The Throw: an Introduction to Diagrammatics

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THE THROW: AN INTRODUCTION TO DIAGRAMMATICS

A Thesis Submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Ryan Jeffrey Johnson

May, 2008

Thesis Written by Ryan Jeffrey Johnson B.A., Kent State University, 2006 M.A., Kent State Univeristy, 2008

______, Advisor Gina Zavota

______, Chair, Department of Philosophy David Odell-Scott

______, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences John R.D. Stalvey

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………..iv

INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………….1

Chapter I. Tracing over the Biographical Strata…………………………….6 1. An Overview of Diagrammatics…………………………….11

II. Foucault and Cartography……………………………………….20 1. Archaeological Maps………………………………………..20 2. The Genealogical Shift……………………………………....34 3. Cartography is Only the Second Moment in the Full Application of Diagrammatics……………………………….44

III. The Speed of Thought and a Fall of the Die……………………..62 1. Diagrammatic Apprenticeship……………………………….63 2. Paradoxical Becomings………………………………………72 3. A Throw of the Die and the Construction of a Diagram……..79 4. Infinite Egresses……………………………………………...89 5. Making Oneself a Diagrammatician………………………..102

IV. The Compound Gallery of Desire………………………………109 1. I……………………………………………………………..109 2. II…………………………………………………………….116 3. III……………………………………………………………126

V. Conclusion……………………………………………………...142

WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………..144

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Acknowledgements

I would first of all like to thank Dr. Gina Zavota, my esteemed advisor, who put up with all of the purple language and chaotic departures from the topic of my thesis and kept me on track so that I could write a thesis with which I am almost completely satisfied. Gina has not only helped my career in uncountable ways but has also become a close friend. I would also like to thank Dr. Gene Pendleton and Dr. Navjotika Kumar;

Dr. Pendleton has been without a doubt the most important teacher in my life, and has inspired in me an indefatigable intellectual curiosity, and Dr. Kumar’s wonderful lessons on twentieth century art have proved essential to my intellectual development. I would also like to thank Dr. David Odell-Scott for taking the time for helping my career and being kind enough to serve as a reader on my thesis defense board. Most of all, however,

I would like to thank my loving girlfriend Charlotte and my wonderful parents Jeff and

Claudia, who supported me at every step of the way with kind words and unconditional love. All of them have proven to be necessary to my success. I am deeply indebted to all of these people and more, for I am not an individuated atom but a mobile heterogeneous multiplicity of thoughts and movements.

Introduction1

Diagrammatics is a rigorous, measured, disciplined, but not disciplinary, four-part process for breaking down dogmatic and static form of life. It is a process of leaving, of creation, of forgetting, of becoming, in which one becomes skilled at reading the formations of knowledge and existence in order not to perpetuate the order of things, but to discover a way of producing an anomaly, of finding a way beyond the apparatuses of capture so that one can venture into the outside. This does not mean that one should simply destroy every form of consistency that one comes across; rather it is necessary to keep portions of the traditional image of thought in order to remain alive, and not quickly descend into catatonia or fascism. For “if you force it too violently, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed…or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratified…is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse.”2

A tracing is the normal way of doing things; it is the common mode of existence, just following the herd, responding to everything in the prescribed way. In this moment, there is little to no creativity; rather there is just rote repetition. Yet this moment is necessary; it is necessary to lodge oneself on the strata, in the culture, to find out how things are organized, how things go. For to blindly attack the stratum helps no one. In

1 This introduction is the summation of the first chapter in my thesis, which was supposed to act as an introduction but was not considered acceptable by my thesis defense committee, hence the repetitiveness. Therefore, this small introduction is required for passing the thesis requirement of the philosophy M.A. program. 2 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1987, p. 161.

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my thesis, my first chapter just traces over the same biographical stories of Foucault and

Deleuze, merely giving the same information that anyone can find in a standard book on these two. Yet after this process is over, after one is familiar with the strata and discovers the opportunities it offers, one can being to experiment; and this is the beginning of the second moment: Foucauldian cartography.

I have chosen Foucault to represent the second moment for many reasons. For one, his histories fit exactly the basic criteria of cartographic analysis. In this moment, we see how Foucault took the standard pictures of historical formations and began to shift the areas of importance, showing how multiple maps could stem from the same content.

This is called cartographic because it is down through alternative colorations. If one were to map Kent, one could color the same place in different ways, color and re-color the same earth and produce different maps. The two conceptual tools that I have chosen to utilize in this moment are articulabilities and visibilities.

For articulabilities, Foucault, in the early part of his career, performed archaeologies. Like uncovering ancient ruins and seeing how an ancient civilization was organized, Foucault sieves through the discourses of historical practices. I have chosen the discourse on madness as my main example; to see how things change and affect each other based on enunciative functions, which he calls statements. Statements are like lines or grids of a map that indicate the direction and patterns of practices through what is said of the objects in the discourse on madness. Statements are direction arrows that reveal the structuration of knowledge and discourses that condition the possibilities for

organization and practice. The statements surrounding the mad in the renaissance are different than the statements in the classical epoche. In this way, the maps that Foucault produces are organized by the effectuation of families of statements. With visibilities, the field of application is transformed by the ways in which the practices are visibly organized. Think of the ways different rooms have different moods by the ways that lighting is set up. In the prison, the organization of penal practices changes in terms of the ways that the prison, and eventually society, are made visible.

Either with articulabilities or visibilities, the second moment, the transformational moment, takes the material generated by the first moment and destabilizes the hierarchical order predominant in traditional histories. The second moment is a process of becoming-minor, of altering the standard landscape and producing a discontinuous atlas of conflicting and disparate maps through radical cartographic diagnosis.

But it is here that Foucault stops short, and where Deleuze comes on the scene with the introduction of the abstract diagram. While Foucault showed how multiple planes could be produced from the same content, always retaining the identities and distinctions of the maps, Deleuze abstracts even further. Now, in the place of categories or identities, there are only the potentialities for future actualization. The diagram provides the possibilities for a different reading, a mode of existence that is yet to come.

The diagram is the dissolution of social forms, whether standard or alternative, which occurs by means of lines of flight that was opened up by Foucault’s splintering of the standard modes of life.

Perhaps the best way of thinking about the diagrammatic moment is to think of learning to swim. After spending time outside the sea or pool, going through the motions, learning the standard way of doing things, one must plunge into the sea. When one jumps into the dark abyss of the sea, one cannot just run through the old motions, but must mix with the singularities of the sea. Eventually, one reaches a breaking point, where previous training, while the necessary conditions, becomes burdensome, for if one tries to recall everything that was given him, he will drown. Rather, one must become the sea, hence the idea of becoming. One must forget the static distinctions separating the body and the sea, and become one with the sea, create a new assemblage consisting of flesh, bone, and water. In this way, life is pushed to a threshold, where new modes of existence will be produced. This is the encounter with the diagram insisting in the outside. From the diagram, new formations of assemblages can emerge. Identities are wiped away leaving only collections of affects.

Once we are left with only potentialities for creation and organization, new forms can be produced, new patterns of life can be actualized. In the fourth chapter, the actualization of diagrammatics potentialities in a new program, I look at Picasso’s variations on Velasquez’s Las Meninas. Mirroring Foucault’s analysis of Velasquez’s original, as a way of looking at the classical age in The order of Things, I use Picasso’s variations as ways of harnessing the intensities and assemblages in order to jam the circuit.

Diagrammatics, then, is a loose methodology for escaping normalization and revealing how one is complicit in the perpetuation of dominant historical structurations,

to pick up on the free movements that are later captured, normalized, and stratified, to shift things just a bit. It is then possible to harness the intensities and differences and begin to destabilize the system and reorient the social field. The concepts that Deleuze and Foucault offer are tools that can be used to short circuit or disqualify systems of power, and create new modes of life that lead to a heightened mode of life.

Chapter I

Tracing Over the Biographical Strata

At Foucault’s funeral Deleuze read aloud this passage from a book of Foucault’s that was only posthumously published:

As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity – the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. People will say, perhaps, that these games with oneself would better be left backstage; or, at best, that they might properly form part of those preliminary exercises that are forgotten once they have served their purpose. But, then, what is philosophy today – philosophical activity, I mean – if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently.3

In a work that hopes to develop a mobile and joyous methodology to break the historical, philosophical, social, and conceptual boundaries of life, I begin, quite appropriately, with the ultimate organic threshold: death. Enumerating every possible constraint reveals that death is the singular event that is shrouded in imperceptibility.

Death is life’s constant double, the poignant imperceptibility of the outside, a mumbling echo of the chance to live differently; it is the posterior border of life, the end of the monotonous self that has been worn down by tasks, duties, and structures, and the

3 Foucault, Michel. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Volume 2. Trans. Robert Hurley. NY: Random House, 1990, pp. 8-9.

beginning of life in the outside. The constant immanence of death, of the flow of life toward an imperceptible end, causes life to recognize its constant movement. Given the flux of life, of incessant becoming-other, stasis is seen as death itself.4 The death that will initiate what I hope to be a pragmatic and challenging web of lines and processes that fosters if not foments an aptitude to think differently is Foucault’s.

Foucault’s main motivation, it might be said, is the desire to write, live, and become different; in fact, Foucault even died differently. Foucault died of a sickness that was nearly unspeakable and unimaginable to the conceptual schema and discourse of late

1970’s and early 1980’s western intellectual scene: HIV. The human immunodeficiency virus struck a fearful chord in the public body and remained, for some time, a category of disease ungraspable by the medical institution. HIV/AIDS was seen as both strange and foreign, a shadowed category that entered the orderly annals of western culture from the unrecognizable margins, the threshold of society. Foucault also lived along the borders of society. As a homosexual man suffering and eventually dying from a modern plague – reminiscent of Foucault’s first great book on the plague of madness in the Middle Ages, leprosy, which was transformed into the plague of the Enlightenment, madness –

Foucault lived as a protean creature unable to be swiftly categorized. He was a historian, literary critic, art theorist, cultural commentator, philosopher, activist, teacher, lecturer, and friend. It might be said that in the hopes of giving voice to the marginalized, lepers, madmen, prisoners, perverts, and other infamous men dragged into the striated grid of western society, Foucault was able to give voice to himself. Thus when Foucault

4 To reverse an old Heideggerian adage, one’s being towards death, according to Foucault, might assume a subtle yet potent reversal of order: death towards being leaves only the becoming of the self as other.

repeatedly said that writing philosophy or history is really the writing of an autobiography, he was telling the truth. As Foucault challenged his readers to confront the forgotten histories constituting historical and contemporary social practices, he attempted to confront his own otherness. Attending to the fate of others became an attention to his own, or even a creation of his fate. In order to create his own fate,

Foucault wrote histories, histories of the excluded other. Deleuze’s abrupt yet delicate comment about his dear friend’s death, then, makes more sense given Foucault’s infinite desire to think differently: “few have died like Foucault, in a way commensurate with their death,”5 for Foucault not only lived, wrote and thought otherwise, he also died otherwise.

Like Foucault, Deleuze admitted, “for a long time [he himself] ‘did’ the history of philosophy” by acting on a Nietzschean

perverse inclination…to say simple things in your own name, to speak through affects, intensities, experiences, experiments. To say something in one’s own name is very curious; for it is not at all when one takes one’s self as an ‘I,’ a person or a subject, that one speaks in one’s name. On the contrary, an individual acquires a real proper name only through the most severe exercise of depersonalization, when one opens himself to the multiplicities that traverse him from head to toe, to the intensities that flow through him…[an exploration of an] infinite variety of postures and situations.6

The first part of Deleuze’s career was spent writing the history of philosophy. Sharing many ideas with Foucault, Deleuze began to mobilize an alliance of historical and contemporary figures, or at least those thinkers that seemed to expand if not destroy the categorization of the canonized history by allowing for the subtle placement of escape

5 Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1986, p. 95. 6 Deleuze, “Lettre a un critique sever,” in Deleuze Pourparlers, p. 118; taken from Miller, James. The Passion of Michel Foucault. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000.

hatches and subterranean pathways that could be harnessed to reveal ways of thinking differently. While such individuals as Spinoza and Hume are often taken to be traditional philosophers, Deleuze finds a loose thread, a dangerous line of thought, the insertion of a destabilizing concept that refuses to be subsumed by the wake of a predominant historical accounts. According to Deleuze, “writing the history of philosophy…[is a gathering of] the arrows or the tools of a great thinker, the trophies and the prey, the continents discovered.”7 In his nomadic conceptual travels, Deleuze collected many arrows and congregated them together to develop a working alliance that would serve as a means for doing philosophy for the rest of his life. Deleuze called together philosophers: Hume,

Spinoza, Leibniz, and, of course, Nietzsche; he also brought writers into the group:

Proust, Kafka, Fitzgerald, Castaneda, and Burroughs; he mustered artists to come along:

Francis Bacon and Barnett Newman; he even found a similar passion for the outside in filmmakers: Herzog, Buñuel, Eisenstein, Bergman; not to mention psychoanalysts: Freud,

Lacan, and, his longtime collaborator Felix Guattari.8 Together they formed a febrile array of voices and ideas, of words and scenes, that resounds even today, held together by their very diversity.

A most important member of this alliance was Foucault. Out of all the histories of philosophers that Deleuze so deftly completed, his book on Foucault, which appeared just two years after that fateful death with which we began, was the only one that truly revealed a tender intimacy between two thinkers that quickly melted into an intensive desire to think differently. As Foucault would later remark about their meeting, “[i]t was

7 Deleuze, Foucault, p. xv. 8 Deleuze actually wrote about or with all of these figures and many more.

not simply a question of understanding or intellectual accord…but of intensity, of resonance, of a musical accord.”9 With such a powerful assemblage of forces surrounding and enveloping them, Foucault and Deleuze set out, albeit independently of each other, to explore the potentialities of their unique paths, always meeting somewhere along the way, yet always breaking away from the strictures of categorical reduction.

Foucault and Deleuze dissolved themselves in the movements and colors of writers, thinkers, artists, and musicians, developing a joyful gang of outsiders, a de-centered band apart. What Deleuze and Guattari said about their famous collaboration can also be said about this heterogeneous alliance: “[s]ince each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away…To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.”10

Yet despite the teeming chaos that seems to be erupting from such a bacchanalian alliance,11 the Deleuzian-Foucauldian alliance was utterly disciplined. The hope of this alliance was to experiment with multiplicity, to lose one self in the flux of thinking differently. This process of depersonalization or the “[d]ismantling [of] the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose the entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft

9 Eribon, Didier. Michel Foucault. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991. pp. 136-37. 10 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 3. 11 ‘Alliance’ is Deleuze’s own term for a collection of ideas and impulses rather than a group of contemporaneous individuals, as the term is often used today.

of a surveyor” (ATP p. 160). Destratification, deterritorialization, or depersonalization is a skill, just as experimentation is a mode of experience, it is the very experience of existence, of becoming.12 The development of this skill, the very experience of becoming otherwise, is what I am calling diagrammatics.

1. An Overview of Diagrammatics

Diagrammatics is rigorous, intense, measured, disciplined, but not disciplinary,13 four-part process, which is clearly laid out at the end of the fifth plateau of A Thousand

Plateaus. The first component is called the generative.14 The generative component is similar to what has just been mentioned in the first part of this introduction, the tracing of the standard account of the lives of two French intellectuals. One simply locates the salient moments of the situation and determines “with what variants, how they combine, and which one is predominant” in a particular domain.15 Foucault has done this most explicitly in the beginning of each of his philosophical histories. In Madness and

Civilization, Foucault locates the operative variables: the leper, the Sultifera Navis,16 statements, the dominant roles, the style of discourse, the madmen, the asylum, the doctor, etc. Each of these parts, which include many more than I have listed, play differential roles in the formation of the discourse of madness during the reign of

12 The French word ‘expérience’ has the double connotation of both experience in the sense of an experience of an event or the experience of waking up at four in the morning and experiment in the sense of scientific experiments or artistic experimentation with new media. 13 The distinction between disciplined and disciplinary will become evident in chapters two and three, but for now the difference is akin to creation, which must be disciplined, and the repetition of the same words and ideas over and over again, which is disciplinary or normalizing. 14 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 139. 15 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 139. 16 Sultifera Navis, which roughly translates as Ship of Fools, is the infamous way of keeping madmen out of sight of the general public. The actual historical workings of this tradition, which is the subject matter of the first chapter of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, will be explained in much greater detail in chapter two of my thesis.

rationality in the Enlightenment. In this book, Foucault gives the topography of the statements17 of clinical institutions as they were emptied of lepers and filled with the insane. The elements, then, combine in different ways, and seem to function, at least in the early archaeological writings, by means of the particular operations of statements.18

Out of this combination of elements dominant forms emerge; for Madness and

Civilization, it is the madmen, the asylum and the rational medical watchman. The generative component, however, stops after the location of the field and the constitutive elements of the field of analysis. The most evident example of the generative component of the traditional image of historical processes is given in standard textbooks; such pictures and stories are in no way creative, but merely trace over the same distinctions again and again. While the traditional account merely heads back to the beginning, redundantly reproducing the same picture, for Foucault and Deleuze this is only the beginning of the story, an important and necessary component of diagrammatics, but only the generation of the static being of the grid of application.

The second component is the transformational; while the generative moment

“makes tracings” the transformational moment “makes maps.”19 The grid of application is re-colored by means of the different elements of transformational cartography. To begin, Foucault colors in the marginalized figures and lives cast aside by the smooth functioning of social distinctions and State regimes. Foucauldian cartographies map the silent and muffled workings of the transformations of social formations through

17 Foucault refers to the methodology of his early writings as archaeological, which should not be taken in the literal sense but more of an abstract conceptual methodology. 18 ‘Statements’ will play a very distinct and nuanced role in Foucault’s methodology. See chapter two of my thesis for a more detailed explanation. 19 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 139.

discontinuous movements and abrupt changes in organization. For example, Foucault explores the changeover from the discourse of leprosy to the creation of the category of madness; or he maps the punitive reformations from public torture and condemnation to penal confinement. Rather than merely tracing over the same sequence of pictures and the redundant histories, a transformational cartography shows how the cases of madness and prisons ultimately retained the role of exclusion and confinement of that which is considered to be other. By inverting the hierarchical order of the Enlightenment through a re-coloration of historical topographies, Foucault was able to give voice to and highlight the violent underpinnings that reinforced the practices of producing a product to be feared, sequestered, and detained. The reformations of the asylum and the prison were not the latest moments in a natural progression of a humanistic manifest destiny, but the establishment of a different regime of words and things. In the discursive domain, certain discursive functions, which Foucault refers to as “statements,” give rise to the creation of the category of madness and the correlative elements of that discourse; in the non- discursive domain, different tools for making bodies visible function as intersecting strata that produce the appearance and the simultaneous penal practice of the prisoner and the guard. Transformational cartography takes the material generated by the first moment of diagrammatics and destabilizes the hierarchical order predominant in traditional tracings.

The second moment of diagrammatics is a process of becoming-minor, or altering the predominate landscape and producing a protean battlefield of history through radical cartographic diagnosis.

At this point, the beginning of the third moment, Foucault stops short; and it is here that Deleuze enters the scene with the introduction of the abstract diagram. A diagram is “something in the assemblage itself that is still more profound than these sides and can account for both the forms in presupposition.”20 These two sides are the form of content and the form of expression: the content, the madman or the prisoner, and the form of expression, the discourse of madness of the penal institution. This diagrammatic machine, however, does not make the distinctions of either tracings or mappings, “even though outside itself [the diagram] presides over that distinction and distribution in the strata, domains, and territories.”21 “[I]t always plays a piloting role,”22 that is, it produces the very potentiality of the formation of discourses and institutions without, thereby, remaining co-extensive with the formations. These functions and traits consist only of movements and rapidities; anonymous undulating peregrinations that get caught in other swarms of intensities and either escape centripetal forces or fall backwards into another assemblage. The elements that fall under the domain of the category of leprosy chase away on a line of escape leading out of the domain of the category and begin to drift and race in swirling patterns without name or face. Eventually, for a number of reasons, these particle-movements combine with other particle-movements to appear on a organized plane as constitutive elements of the category of madness. The distinctions operative on a certain stratum or in a certain domain only exist by way of the actualization of diagrammatic potentiality. For example, the way the distinction between lepers and non- lepers slipped away and was replaced by the new distinction between madness and

20 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 140-141. 21 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 141. 22 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 142.

sovereign rationality is a result of the actualization of diagrammatic features. A diagram, however, is

neither an infrastructure that is determining in the last instance nor a transcendental Idea that is determining in the supreme instance. The diagrammatic…does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality. Thus when it constitutes points of creation or potentiality it does not stand outside history but is instead always “prior to” history. Everything escapes, everything creates – never alone but through a [diagram] that produces continuums of intensity.23

Diagrammatics, then, is the art of the dissolution of social formations – prisons, asylums, regimes of signs, totalitarian governments, reductive ways of thinking – and the construction of a new reality.

The last component of diagrammatics is the effectuation of diagrammatic functions or traits in concrete assemblages. In the third moment of diagrammatics, there is the spark of an assemblage of movements away from centralized formations, the predominant terms or desired objects in axiomatics and capitalism, towards the periphery.

The last moment of diagrammatics, the push toward the peripheral edge, is seen in a new reading of Picasso’s transformative variations of Velasquez’s Las Meninas.24 This is the program of a new way of thinking, of thinking differently. By utilizing many of the aforementioned Foucauldian-Deleuzian concepts that have been collected over much of their respective oeuvres, it is possible to produce a processual methodology for destabilizing the stratifying and reductive effects of contemporary capitalist society.

Diagrammatics provides the means to plug into the field of axiomatics in order to know it, understand it, and discover its weak joints so that such structurations can be blown apart, which is exactly what Picasso did. Diagrammatics allows one to

23 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 142. 24 To see the paintings to which I refer, see chapter four

[l]odge [one]self on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight…Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole “diagram.”25

Without recourse to untamed destratification, diagrammatics can be a loose methodology for escaping normalization and categorization by a dominant regime of power. A person, an orchid, a wasp, a geological formation, a word, a facial expression, a stutter, a gait, and so on are not particular members of their respective encompassing categories but absolute singularities, unique yet reciprocally differential movements that always escape the apparatuses of capture and categorization. Diagrammatics, then, hopes to reveal these singularities, to make one become aware of one’s complicity in the perpetuation of a predominant historical structuration, to pick up on the imperceptiblities that are captured, reduced and overcoded by categories and tracings; diagrammatics is a process of becoming-imperceptible. Through a diagrammatic analysis of practices of normalization and the effective structuration of these practices, it is possible to harness the movement and differences and begin to destabilize the system and reorient the social field.

Diagrammatics is an affirmation of difference, of chance, of becoming, where it is no longer possible to become a perfect consumer, no longer necessary to examine each and every product, weighing how many cents will be saved if one buys the generic jar rather then the brand name jar, because the diagram knows only differences, differences in movement. While cartography is a symptomology, a transformational movement that maps out the changes and inner workings of the words and things that are predominant in

25 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 161

a particular social institution, diagrammatics abstracts even further. Foucault, a cartographer, strips away self-evidencies and other positivities to create a stage populated by folly, violence, disorder, exclusion and confinement; and Deleuze, a diagrammtician, tears down the stage, bares the characters of their clothes, names, faces, bodies, and souls, and leaves only off-stage machines whirring in relief, presenting the transmission of particles through affective relations. What Foucault himself said of Deleuze can also be applied to any digrammatician, “there is no heart, but only a problem – that is, a distribution of notable points; there is no center but always de-centerings, series, from one to the other, with the limp of a presence and an absence of an excess, of a deficiency.”26 Deleuze is the diagrammatic “player [who] temporarily abandons himself to life and temporarily fixes his gaze upon it; the artist [who] places himself provisionally in his work and provisionally above it.”27 The abstract freedom of the diagram allows for unforeseeable combinations and connections that were previously obfuscated by the recognizable identity of particles when they were stratified by certain historical formations in which they are caught. Foucault himself, echoing an old Nietzschean adage, describes the elements of his oeuvre:

All my books, whether Madness and Civilization or this one [Discipline and Punish], are little toolboxes, if you will. If people are willing to open them and make use of such and such a sentence or idea, of one analysis or another, as they would a screwdriver or a monkey wrench, in order to short circuit or disqualify systems of power, including even possible the ones my books come out of, well, all the better.28

26 Foucault, Michel. “Theatrum Philosophicum,” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977, .p.1 27 Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomilson. NY: Columbia University Press, 1983. , p. 24. 28 Foucault, “Des supplices aux cellules” Le Monde, February 21, 1975.

The four chapters of this work will correspond to the four moments of diagrammatics. This reworking and reconstruction of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of diagrammatics has certainly undergone many changes; it has collected together, in a single, mobile diagram, many of the concepts that populate the works of Foucault,

Deleuze, Guattari, Nietzsche, and contemporary artists. Although diagrammatics only explicitly appears in a few sections of A Thousand Plateaus, the tenor and force of this methodology, to use the term loosely, resonate with almost all of Deleuze’s overall work.

It is then my hope to retain the excitement and fervor that has led me to spend so much time with this constellation of ideas and concepts through my own exposition. While

Foucault has certainly provided a wide array of important tools for this study, I believe that he ultimately stops too soon, always working within a social domain. Deleuze and

Guattari, on the other hand, attempt to break down these human constraints and listen to the sources of inspiration coming in from the outside. It is in this sense that diagrammatics is a process of becoming: becoming-other, becoming-animal, becoming- imperceptible, and eventually becoming-actual. Like Deleuze’s reading of the history of philosophy, there is an intimate relationship between affectivity and conceptuality; and theoretical analysis is certainly indispensable to this study. Through a radical exposition of some Foucauldian and Deleuzian concepts, diagrammatics, as I have conceived of it, attempts a dynamic transformation of the traditional image of thought. This new manner of doing philosophy, which is more of a stylistics and aesthetics in a very Nietzschean sense, reconciles the speed of thought with the movement of becomings, thereby creating a new relationship among philosophy, art, literature, the social, and the world of the

outside. Given this momentous evaluation of philosophy, diagrammatics should be read as more of a melody populated by refrains, choruses, crescendos, and decrescendos. So while you are reading through this attempt at constructing an intensive style of philosophy, try to pick up on and harness the power of a challenge to the traditional image of philosophy, a violent push that leads to a heightened state of life.

Chapter II

Foucault and Cartography

1. Archaeological Maps

For all the criticisms that can be leveled against Foucault’s historical mappings, the rigor, discipline, and skill of research and understanding in such diligent scholarship are admirable. If we were able to shadow Foucault as he spent his time in the archives, sifting through crumpled notes, translating pages that had not seen the light of day in some time, reading and re-reading obscure passages that seem to have nothing to do with the subject matter of common historical research – wanted posters, death notices, medical reports, dimensions of bathroom stalls, exact length of medical hallways, the color of bed sheets or lab coats – we would see the actualization of a transformational dimension taking place in historical analyses, the second moment in diagrammatics.

It is not in Hegel or Auguste Comte that the bourgeoisie speaks openly. Alongside these texts that are regarded as sacred there is an absolutely conscious strategy, one that is organized and well thought out, that can be read clearly in the masses of unknown documents constituting the effective discourse of a political action.29

In searching through these “unknown documents,” Foucault is drawing a map, indicating a plane of potentiality, experimenting with cross-referencing, transducting multiple planes, bodies, and voices. Rather than following the lines and markings of

29 Foucualt, “Des supplices aux cellules,” Le Monde, February 21, 1975.

20 21

previous historical geographies, Foucault searches for the points of breaking down and building up, the joints and fissures, of implicit and explicit coercion, and the workings of

structure-generating apparatuses that seem to produce and re-produce styles of discourse analysis. Behind the production of these styles is an abstract organizing force that produces the possibilities for the available modes of existence. This apparatus knows nothing of formal distinctions: natural, inorganic, human, animal, synthetic are all formal determinations springing from the codifications of the functions and traits emerging from an abstract diagram. A diagram is the structure-generating apparatus of what I am calling cartography. Foucault’s maps are not meant to re-present society and its precise historical formations, nor are they mere reapplications of redundant archetypes, rather they indicate the points of convergence and divergence, points of breaking off and opening up to the potentiality for the creation of new functions.

Attempting to take a different reading of Foucault, one influenced by the topological-philosophical underpinnings of Deleuze and Guattari, the histories that

Foucault has offered can be thought of as maps, geographies, or topologies that can be manipulated through illustration and color. Color in this sense should call to mind an indeterminate spectrum from which determination can occur. The color continuum is a field of potentialities that Foucault can pull from as he illustrates alternative histories.

Depending on the complexion that is used to convey a certain affect in a historical picture or mapping, conflicting expressions of the same content can arise. One of Foucault’s first

topological-philosophical moves, then, is the unveiling of different readings of the same historical events by way of coloration, for “[a]nalysis and illustration go hand-in-hand.”30

In all of Foucault’s historical maps, perhaps the most striking element of such analyses are the colors, the tenor of the illustrations, the style of production, the contrasts in color: the contrast of the color of the school uniforms and the dress of the instructors; the shade of the skin of the tortured body and the wash of the executioner’s hood; the slivers of reflection slipping off “instruments of violence or ideology”;31 the cracks in the wood of the surface of the ship of fools, and the tincture of the distended faces of madmen writhing in cages and chains. These contrasts and colors reveal the possibility for an initial inversion, an alternative coloration that occurs throughout Foucault’s works.

As depicted in one of Foucault’s earliest works, Madness and Civilization, the aim of the

Enlightenment was to achieve and elaborate clarity; to clearly delineate differences based on the autonomous judgments of rational individuals. Colors bleed into one another, and must then be purified and sterilized to the greatest degree. Morality must remain clearly distinct from immorality; truth should never be confused with falsity. The figure of moral judgments or logical movements should eliminate the opacity that coloring most often brings. In the midst of all this story of Enlightenment purification and decontamination – that is, de-coloration – Foucault found the possibility for drawing up a new canvas, for coloring with a new palate.

In highlighting the layers of obscurity that serve as the background assumptions set in place to preserve the smooth functioning of social practices, Foucault overturns the

30 Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. NY: Vintage Books, 1979, p. 24. 31 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 26.

accepted readings of sequences of events. Foucault threw balls of color on the cleansing illumination, thereby shifting the emphasis from the primary values of the given maps to the marginalized tinctures of background practices, on the background practices and apparatuses that served as the supports that allowed the values of autonomous reason to stand out so clearly. The muffled voices that were enveloped and pushed back into the corners as voices of unreason and cases of immorality are now offered the opportunity to clearly ring out. It is as if Foucault takes a snapshot of a typical day in the panoptic prison and gives us a sequence of negative images alongside the normal positive sequence of pictures; depending on the coloring and manner of organization, the same picture can produce a divergent and disconnected montage. The priority of the figure- ground distinction is reversed; we can no longer help but pay attention to the ground, both foreground (the standard humane picture of prison reform) and background (the abusive, insidious practices of exclusion and confinement), because of these inverting cartographic techniques; and this inversion, it can be said, is one of the main components of a Foucauldian cartography. This component “arouse[s] the desire to no longer accept things to reflect upon, ready-made from the hands of historians….It [is] a way of providing new historical objects for reflection…it [is] not reflection on history but reflection in history. A way of testing thought with work in history; also a way of testing work in history by a transformation of conceptual and theoretical frameworks.”32 This transformational component reveals the unsaid set of procedures covered up by the given figure-ground distinction. The bubbling “supplementary” details are stood on their feet,

32 Foucault, interview, Liberation, January 21, 1983; from Eribon, Didier. Michel Foucault.

while the “primary” procedures are laid down as the new background. Such “minute material details”33 cannot be erased by a reductionistic history of institutional punishment and madness; such details, which are lost in the redundancies of tracing, cannot be omitted from the surface of a cartographic analysis. Color is often the first thing to go when histories are simply redrawn or traced. Merely tracing over the same set of events, allowing the same primary figures to stand out, and pushing back the colors of background practices is the opposite of cartographic analysis.

A Foucauldian landscape produces multi-layered formations of two kinds: linguistic formations that revolve around certain families of statements and non-linguistic formations that appear according to the shape and model of illumination. The archaeological methodology of Foucault’s early works - Madness and Civilization, The

Birth of the Clinic, and The Archaeology of Knowledge – focuses mostly on the linguistic formations guiding and revealing the discourses of different social configurations. Rather than trying to reinterpret the classical historian’s stock of material – propositions, phrases, speeches, narrations – which mimetically reproduce the standard decals and orders of a social, discursive formation, Foucault attempts to move across the formations or strata along a diagonal line that cuts between the medical discourse, the penal discourse, the asylum, etc. Statements are neither propositions nor utterances but something much more contextualized in the discursive activity at work in institutions. A statement exists by way of variation in application; a statement cannot exist alone in empty space but must change with the evolving familial relations strewn among other

33 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 30.

statements. A statement, then, changes according to the “functioning of the field of use in which it is placed” and “oscillates according to the use that is made of the statement and the way in which it is handled.”34 Depending on the changing familial relations, a statement can have different truth conditions. Furthermore, a statement is not an utterance because different phrases or utterances can repeat the same statement. In punitive discourses, for example, the family of statements shifted from the delineation of a criminal that is defined as an enemy of the king to the delinquent that becomes the enemy of every contributing citizen. With the change in effective statements comes the change in discursive structuration. In such a discontinuous changeover, one family of statements is replaced with another. Once such a mutation has occurred, different sets of utterances operate by way of the same family of statements.

The same family of statements can be made in different languages or even non- linguistic media. While propositions operative in a particular discourse can be rehashed and rethought a number of different ways – always, however, utilizing similar material toward similar ends – statements are families or series of regularities that allow particular individuals acting as functions of a particular discourse to address the object of study.

For the discourse surrounding the mad, the doctor-function, which Foucault often calls the “medical personage,” is a composite or mixture of minor particles that occupies a certain discursive position and can fulfill a number of possible propositions, pieces of advice, or orders that act upon the patient-function; the patient-function, in turn, is also a mixture of organized body-parts, responding and acting upon the doctor-function. “With

34 Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans Alan Sheridan. NY: Pantheon Books, 1972, p. 104.

the new status of the medical personage, the deepest meaning of the confinement is abolished: mental disease, with the meanings we now give it, is made possible.”35

Foucauldian mappings, with the inversion of the order of supplementarity through alternative colorations, provide a new picture of historical events and social configurations by rethinking the nature of institutional relationships in terms of the development of structures of domination and confinement. The institution of the mad was organized and stratified around a series of complex hierarchical relations of confinement, with the patients, of course, occupying the lowest categorical position.

Statements allow for the asymmetrical exercise of precise regularity upon the mad through the building of layers or strata that code composite matter-energy flows that take the form of institutional personages.

For example, the transference of the social stigma of the dangerous “other” from the leper to the mad man hinges on the enunciation of the same family of statements.

“[T]here may be, therefore, interwoven or alternating, different meanings operating on the same enunciative base,” that is, the family of operative statements.36 This is not, however, a sort of hermeneutical search for a deeper meaning, a practice that Foucault constantly disavowed, for linguistic formations actually produce the object or subject about which they speak in the very utterances emitted by the doctor or by the madman, right at the surface level of discursive confrontation. A family of statements both constitutes and governs “the dynamics of collective human interaction,” thereby producing and controlling what it means to be a doctor or a patient in given historical

35 Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization. Trans. Richard Howard. NY: Pantheon Books, 1965, p. 270. 36 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 110.

processes; there is a heterogeneous collection of “decentralized process[es] in which each word locally restricts the speaker’s choices at each point in the construction.”37

Statements at work in the discourse in and around the asylum produce the very possibility of the position of the doctor as well as the position of the patient. Rather than a unique doctor with personal motivations speaking, a third person medical subject speaks; a “one speaks” as a blank and passive player in a ductile discourse. “The doctor’s intervention is not made by virtue of a medical skill or power that he possesses in himself and that would be justified by a body of objective knowledge. It is not as a scientist that homo medicus has authority in the asylum, but as a wise man,”38 or, perhaps more accurate, the mode of the wise man that enunciates a certain collection of wise statements. The doctor, the patient, and the treatment are the subject, the object, and the concept produced by a family of medical statements. These discursive elements are the effects of the play of statements, which engenders “a sort of great unreason for which nothing, in fact, is exactly responsible, but which involves everyone in a kind of secret complicity.”39

Turning to a book that most clearly demonstrates what I am calling the diagonality of statements, The Order of Things plainly shows how statements cut across the discourse of the life, labor, and language triad posited in this early work. Prior to the particular propositions and sentences used in each respective discursive formation, statements allow for the possibility of the regularity, association, and conjugation of studies of what can be said about this triad. This is not to say that statements are some latent or hidden structure lying behind discourse, but are effectively present in each

37 De Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. NY: Zone Books, 1997,, pp. 218, 219. 38 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 270 39 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 16

enunciation of problems. Beginning with the available symptoms – the words and phrases used by pre-biologists and patients, economists and laborers, pre-linguists and language users – Foucault follows the movements of the language as they are exchanged between different discursively formed subject-positions around particular problems. A profound symptomology.

The point of drawing such a map is not to reveal a continuous line of the history of scientific progress, which would indicate the steady development of science from its early modern inchoate forms to the more sophisticated disciplines that are common today, but to demonstrate that the early forms of defining the relationships between the doctors, the mad, and the greater public, for example, were instances of social confinement. It is not the case that such relationships were continuously refined in order to bring about a more humane practice that slowly creeps closer and closer to the truth; rather the system of confinement merely found different words and phrases to surround the discourse of the mad, different ways of composing the discursive plane.40

Foucauldian cartography splinters this discursive plane in order to show that these changes were not points on a steady evolution toward a more humane treatment of mad men, for “it was from the depths of confinement itself that generated the phenomenon; it was from confinement that we must seek an account of this new awareness of madness.”41 “A field of knowledge is only as interesting as its most dangerous ideas, the ones that escape its control and crack its own foundations. If it is true that there is no

40 In French, plan has a double implication of a “plan”, agenda, or methodology for accomplishing some task and a “plane”, surface, or map of a geometrical or geographical locale. Retaining both senses of the concept, architectural plans or designs are conjoined with certain forms of expression. 41 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 224.

“real” progress…[only] dangerous ideas keep it alive.”42 Cartographic archeology disrupts the comfortable stance that is so firmly attributed to the abilities of scientific and medical discourse to capture objective truth, by demonstrating through words and statements the inherent oddities that lie at the heart of the formations of our most well accepted social systems.

Using the strange and often shocking accounts of the treatment of madmen or prisoners to clearly break down the self-evident nature often attributed to these accounts,

Foucault offers a methodology to reflect upon our own contemporary discourses.

Although modern society is often blinded by the words and catch phrases that surround these inveterate discourses, contemporary psychiatric or penal discourses cannot claim the right to finally establishing means to access the truth, but must be held up for the same radical scrutiny that should be obvious when the subject matter is 200 years old.

What was obvious and evident to the discourse of the mad in the 17th century is now considered primitive and obsolete, and given the findings of the archaeological methods, the same will most likely be said about our own practices and discourses. However, it must be said, at one and the same time, while we often disparagingly refer to these outdated practices, it is possible to admire the diligence of systematic order and categorization. The structural codes of discourse that guided the doctors in the asylum were as comprehensive and formalized as our own contemporary discourses. “What has

42 Bogard, William. “Sense and Segmentarity: Some Markers of a Deleuzian-Guattarian Sociology.” Sociological Theory, Vol. 16, No. 1. Mar., 1998, pp. 52-74,” p. 1.

changed is the silent configuration in which language finds support,”43 that is, the articulability of a family of statements.

In the book on madness, the problem was what to do with the space opened up after the disappearance of leprosy. The discourse of the asylum was a process of stratifying that which is considered to be other: a category gathering together, by way of the structuration of statements, what is considered to be dangerous, immoral or unacceptable. While the history of cultural forms of exclusion is continuous, constantly re-established through changes in history and the manner of confinement, the content of the confinement – the prisoner or the madman – changes according to the elaborations of the discursive formations for the practice of confinement. Relatively arbitrarily, with a small decree and with the dissipation of leprosy and the installation of medicine able to control and contain the spread of the feared disease, there opened up an empty placeholder that another group, class, or race of people could fill. Foucault demonstrates that it was not always the case that people viewed the mad as pitiful, irremediable, necessarily needing to be contained but – through the changes in the organization of institutions of medicine, pseudo-psychology, religion, and the economy – the category of madness took its modern form. In previous times, the madman was often seen as blessed by God, as untouched by the ills of society, or even as a rare source of wisdom. Yet while the individualities involved in the formation of such discourses were limned in by the available corpus of language with which they could use to refer to objects of study and practice, the analysis of statements that Foucault proposes and utilizes allows the

43 Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. Trans. Alan Sheridan. NY: Vintage Books, 1994, p. xi.

cartographer to move diagonally across disciplines or strata, freely existing among a space of transversality. Such a mobile space provides the cartographer with the means to

“bring out the conditions of acceptability of a system and follow the breaking points which indicate [the] emergence” 44 and appearance of the discourse of the mad or the prison. Cartographic archaeology opens up the surface language or positivities to see into the immanent workings of phrases, propositions, words and the effective yet often contradictory and discontinuous statements that allow enunciation to occur as they cut a diagonal line across different social strata.

The curve of a statement is not, however, meant to encompass all of what is said and done in a social formation, as Foucault quite distinctly repeats throughout interviews while conveying the necessity of refraining from laying claims to totality. Similarly, the elements of Foucauldian cartographies that are either downplayed or left out completely should in no way be disqualified as utterly unimportant. Foucault’s methods and strategies by no means prevent other mappings but actually leave fissures sporadically along the way so that other routes can remain open for future cartographers. In doing so,

Foucault is challenging the obviousness of contemporary practices. If he can demonstrate an alternative way to read the conditions that have led to the modern asylum and prison, then it is possible to read the present day practices in an alternative light.

History, then, becomes more of a battleground, a site of conflicting accounts, each story overlaying the other. What seems most self-evident and axiomatic to us today might have an obscene underbelly of ambiguous and contradictory practices and currents.

44 Foucault, Michel. The Essential Foucault: Selections from the Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984. Eds. Paul Rabinow and Nicolas Rose. NY: New Press, 2003, p. 275.

Mapping is selective; that is, one concentrates on elements of a complex heterogeneous field that are most interesting or operative to a particular analysis. In a single map there is a plurality; or, to flip the metaphor, in an atlas there is the possibility for singular maps.

In this way, Foucault’s maps can be thought of more as “anticipatory dots” or

“game openings” that are in continuous transformation, experiments of approaching the practices and discourses surrounding problems.45 There is a change in focus from a search for solutions, finalized truths, and stultifying capture to selection, importance, and relevance. Foucault selects certain elements to analyze – such as the creation of the abnormal individual, or the changes in perspectives on punishment – and positions these elements or dots in creative ways. The subsequent map then provides entryways and exits into and out of predominant formations. It is then, through this novel methodology, that the game will have been opened to previously sidelined players. Foucauldian cartographies help “to displace oneself insidiously within [a social formation], to descend a notch, to descend to its smallest gestures…to deviate slightly from it, to open the door from either side to the small talk it excluded; it is to initiate another disconnected and divergent series; it is to construct, by way of this small lateral leap, a dethron[ing]” of tracings.46 In short, Foucault called for “an analytical grid” that functions not in terms of truth, falsity, or legitimacy of a given discourse but by developing the links, relays, and feedback effects among the legislative maneuvers, the establishment of decrees and institutional manifestos, the appearance of authority in words and physical materials that can be drawn together along different dimensions so as to develop a statement-curve that

45 Foucault, “Questions of Method,” The Foucault Effect; from Rabinow, Essential Foucault, p. 246. 46 Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” p. 1.

functions across different strata or social formations; and mapping out such transversal lines allows the battle site of history to open up to alternative accounts and irregular landscapes.

The Archaeology of Knowledge, however, makes an important distinction between discourse and the effective diagonality of statements, that is, the way statements carry out the effectuation of a number of relations of force by making those relations converge along a certain forceful line cutting across discourses, on the one hand, and the negatively defined non-discursive elements of historical mappings that include the environment, physical material, technologies, mechanisms, and practices in which statements take effect, on the other. This point is uniquely Foucauldian. There are reciprocal feedback effects from discourse to practice, from practice to discourse. More than merely hinting at the necessity of interdisciplinarities, Foucault is conveying the ways in which language and bodies interact, each affecting and being affected by each other. The discourse of the mad must take place in some place at a particular time, and to exclude such environmental implications from historical studies, while it might prove to be a useful technique in some ways, often ignores the necessary overlap between language and the expression of language in an environment. This is not to say, however, that the form of the prison or the form of the prisoner must refer back to some linguistic element that gave rise to the expression of punishment, but rather to reveal that institutional practices and events in the development of the prison have a landscape that are included in a greater feedback loop of the discursive/non-discursive register.

The difference between the archaeological-discursive map and the genealogical- non-discursive map is seen in the difference between articulability and visibility. The statement that allows for the regularity and operations of articulability in discourse is nested in the descriptive visibilities at work in non-discursive practices: they are “two heterogeneous forces of formalization and integration.”47 The genealogical turn seen in

Discipline and Punish brings out the visual and physical effects of action upon the bodies of the prisoners while statements integrate the linguistic formation and regularity of the relationship between the medical personae and the mad man, for example. Through the use of vocabularies that include such notions as melancholia, mania, hysteria, and delirium, the madman is structurally located in the position of the abnormal individual.

The development and use of the discourse of the mad effectuates the ways in which individuals relate to others. Relations are carved up and maintained by the effective use of discourses. In the prison, on the other hand, at least according to the genealogical methodology, the delimitation and form of vision in the penal theaters in which one sees and is seen captures and defines the subject and object of punishment by way of the operative cone of visibility. The prisoner appears as such due to the forms of visibility; that is, the prisoner is illuminated as a prisoner (abnormal individual, criminal, delinquent) due to the functional positioning in practices. In short, the archaeology captures through the organization of words and the genealogy captures through scenes that serve as the moving configurations that give rise to the formation of discourse.

47 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 80.

2. The Genealogical Shift

While Foucault never abandons the archaeological methodology of discursive analysis, the genealogical shift reverses the primacy of the non-discursive and the discursive, forcing the discursive to assume an underlying yet important backseat as light is shed on the practice of the relations of knowledge, power, and the bodies in social strata or constellations. There is a shift in methodological emphasis as Foucault moves from the archeological analytic of statements and discourses to the genealogical methodology of visibilities and non-discursive practices, which most notably and chronologically became clear after his involvement with the student-worker protests in

Paris in May 1968. The archeological or

critical side of the analysis deals with the systems enveloping discourse; attempting to mark out and distinguish the principles of ordering, exclusion, and rarity in discourse… The genealogical side of discourse, by way of contrast, deals with series of the effective formation of discourse: it attempts to grasp it in its power of affirmation, by which I do not mean a power opposed to that of negation, but the power of constituting domains of objects, in relation to which one can affirm or deny true or false propositions.48

The archaeological analytic subdued the practices and physical environments in which discourses are formed, thus requiring a step back from the discursive stance directly inside of the family of statements surrounding the mad. The genealogist, by contrast, assumes a distanced position, refusing to get caught up in hermeneutical games of the search for deeper meanings or hidden essences. As statements required a clearing or space through which a discursive operation could take effect, the field of visibility must also be opened up and illuminated in terms of the emergence of practices and operations of relations among forces.

48 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 234.

Practices are planes of reciprocally determined, determining, and indeterminate forces of different intensities. Forces are necessarily relational, existing only among a diversity of forces, among relations of power. For it does not make sense to speak of a force independently of other forces; that is, a force is only such as long as it is affecting and being affected by other forces. Power is exactly that: not a subject or object, but a relation among active variables that incite, induce, provoke, encourage, detain, etc.

Genealogical maps lay out the ways in which forces act upon each other, the way forces are distributed across space, the plan of ordering how forces can relate and incite each other, the forms of composition that relations may take. By looking at the space and the movements that occur in those spaces, a genealogical cartography follows the way the forces associated with the guard (shouting, observing, controlling, distributing) converge and affect the movements associated with the prisoner (working, sleeping, obeying, marching). The genealogist pays attention to what is made visible in the prison map: the emergence of sites of conflict and affectivity in the prison define the style of operation and distribution of power in such an institution.

Deleuze defines these distributions, styles, and forms of composition in terms of affects: “each force has the power to affect (others) and to be affected (by others again), such that each force implies power relations: and every field of force distributes forces according to these relations and their variations. Spontaneity and receptivity now take on new meaning: to affect and be affected.”49 Spontaneity is the matter of force, the bare, unformed, and independent attributes of an object before objectification, as receptivity is

49 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 71.

the function of force, pure and abstracted from assumed forms of stratification. In fact, to push Deleuze a little bit further, due to the perpetual struggle evinced in these maps, there is more of a structural field of conflict than a relationship between spontaneity and receptivity. The point in distinguishing relationships and structural fields is to indicate the necessary placement of movements on a plane of possibilities. The prisoner and the guard can only enter into and constitute such a relationship within the visibilities of the prison plane. Neither the prisoner nor the guard is such outside of the prison.

Correlatively, the place of the prison is only such due to the effectuation of penal relations. The plane and the relationships occurring on the face of the plane reciprocally fix each other through “rituals” [practices] and meticulous procedures.”50 Hence the emphasis on visibility and practice. These rituals are not ascribed to any one subject, but a multiplicity of affects acting on actions amongst a larger arena illuminated by the genealogical methodology. As we will see in later in the final chapter, which pulls from many ideas developed in Discipline and Punish, the site of the operation of rituals of power relations is localized in the prison, more specifically, Bentham’s Panopticon.

Even in the prison, supposedly a fixed location, forces are in continuous motion, moving across the different sites of struggle and conflict. Yet the gap opening up between articulation and visibility, or between the discursive and the non-discursive, renders the map unstable: “it is an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile interior from within or from underneath”51; and this is an inherent

50 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 358. 51 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 356.

and desirable trait of Foucauldian cartographies because it reveals possibilities for the transformation of relations.

In Discipline and Punish, a new folding of colors or a new map of differentiated trajectories is drawn with the distinction between “an environmental formation” and “a form of content.”52 The school, the barracks, the prison, and the hospital become the environmental formations as the pupils, the soldiers, the prisoners, and the inpatients become the content formalized through the “non-unifying immanent cause that is coextensive with the whole social field.”53 Bringing particular individuals or particles into concrete assemblages in particular institutions results in the reciprocal determination of formations.

The main theme of Foucault’s genealogies is power; yet, following Deleuze, power must be diagnosed as distinct from its formulation within classical Marxism, and clarified through an exacting examination that proceeds by way of the analysis of a few interlaced, braided, and forking postulates: power as property, localization, subordination, essence, attribute, ideology, and legality.54 Power is not something owned by a particular class, not a property that is exerted asymmetrically, but strategies, practices,

“manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functions” that move in all directions. Power is not a localization in a government center, but immanently pervasive and exercised through specific mechanisms and technologies. Power is not mere subordination, but a “whole economy” that twists and spreads through many surfaces, many institutions, and many individuals. Power is not an essence, but a set of emerging relations among forces that

52 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 38. 53 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 37. 54 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 25-30.

cross boundaries, penetrate walls, break through tissues, and return with a varying impulse in any direction. Power is not an ideology, but affectivity, the production of production, etymologically speaking, a leading forth of a leading forth, the normalization of norms, action upon action. Deleuze gives the example of a political convention: political activity occurs in the fervor erupting in the hall or on the street, while the ideology is always situated on the platform. Power is not a legality of the state, but the distribution of illegalisms, the collection of material and language, the allocation of words and things. While these distinctions are certainly accurate, it is time to be more precise and flesh out these postulates that Deleuze so elegantly articulates about his dear friend.

Power is more of a how than a what, not an elimination of that which is designated by power but an initial step in a cartographic analysis. By placing the tip of his stylus on the issue of how power is practiced, the ways in which it is effectuated and becomes codified as this or that type of thing, Foucault actually allows the question of what power is to be re-organized, allowing for the re-thinking of the very question of what power is through the production of new strategies and depictions with differently arranged colors, details and figures on a selected map. Rather than developing a new ontology of power, which has never been Foucault’s aim, questions of where, when, and how practice emerges allow him to examine and produce a new “thematics of power.”55

Power, then, is not exerted from a ruling class that hoards it and uses is as the finite stock of tools against those who seem to lack it, but an exercise of strategies and

55 Foucault, “The Subject and Power”; from Dreyfus, Hubert and Rabinow, Paul. Michel Foucault: Beyond Hermeneutics and Structuralism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982. p. 217.

tactics. It is more of an issue of capacity to express the successful functioning of organization and institutions. Thinking of power as capacities highlights the situated interconnectivity of exercises and practices. Rather, networks of communication presuppose relations of power as relations of power imply networks of communication.

Yet while discourse and communication have as their aim the direct results of the transference of signification in general, usually from one term to another or from one source to a receptacle, power relations are discontinuous sets of actions and movements that induce the differential elements of such relations in distinct ways and produce other types of action as well. This means that there is no fixed entity of power. Unlike significance, power does not exist outside of practices, mechanisms, and technologies.

The relationship between the guard and the prisoner is not direct in the sense of the guard-particle acting directly on the prisoner-particle, but the actions associated with the guard affecting the actions associated with the prisoner. The difference between the two collections of actions is the possibilities for affectivity. The prisoner is defined as the set of affects that are different from, yet reciprocally determined by, the set of affects defining the guard. The definitions placed on the collections of affects result from the ways in which visibilities and articulabilities emerge and attain a certain level of concretization. The prisoner and guard terms can be draped over the set of actions produced in the meeting of two multiplicities of particles, but they are not required. The two formations have lines of affectivity extending into other sets of relations – the prisoner is also a son, a brother, a father, a lover, musician – to momentarily use other macro-identities. The guard-collection breaks the guard boundaries by diverging from

the normal set of procedures of being a guard – by torturing or taunting the prisoner in unforeseen ways, or offering an understanding voice of concern or support. Similarly, the prisoner-collection transgresses the prisoner boundaries by breaking from the typical procedures and movements of being a prisoner – by refusing to obey the orders of the guard, organizing a prison riot, or establishing a self-improvement program that allows prisoners to conjugate together and take educational classes or study sessions. The guard-collection and the prisoner-collection are malleable assemblages caught in mutating systems of relations between differential modes of acting through and beyond projected constraints. Seeing relations or power as reciprocal activities allows for a moving economy of actions that open up or close off possibilities.

The exercise of power…operates on the field of possibilities in which the behavior of active subjects is able to inscribe itself. It is a set of actions on possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; it releases or contrives, makes more probably or less; in the extreme, it constrains or forbids absolutely, but it is always capable of acting upon one or more acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions.56

What defines the prisoner and the free man, a good student or a bad student, a desired body type or a pitiful body type, are the ways in which actions of each group affect and are affected by each other as they are “caught up in…system[s] of subjection

(in which need is also a political instrument meticulously prepared, calculated and used); the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body.”57 These elements of differential relations lead or are led into a field of

56 Foucault, “The Subject and Power”; from Dreyfus,and Rabinow. Michel Foucault, p. 220. 57 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 26.

possibilities in which diverse ways of acting and being acted upon are pro-duced.58 All sides are active, all sides lead, there is a scene of “permanent provocation,”59 or leading by the intensity of the voice or the movement of the body.

Cartography takes certain movements or lines that appear in similar patterns on a particular historical stratum and opens up the connections amongst mechanisms and devices used to coerce assemblages or specific categories of assemblages and the types of statements and utterances that are attributed the status of knowledge. These mechanisms of coercion can be explicit or implicit rules, social codes, manners, dress codes, laws, proclamations made from authoritarian positions, media outlets, etc.; and the types of statements, pictures, graphs, equations, books that all fit into a context defined by a system (knowledge). The question is not what is actually true or false, desirable or undesirable, objective or conjective, but how the technologies of power hook up with these elements of knowledge; that is, the ways in which the plane of forces is organized and practiced. The lesson to take, rather, is the depiction of prisoner-guard relations as particle-processes moving along institutional axes at different speeds and slownesses.

These are not atoms or definite elements that are delimited by their given forms, but,

“depending on their degree of speed or the relation of movement and rest into which they enter, they belong to a given Individual, which may itself be part of another Individual

58 While Foucault articulates the possibility of thinking of power relations as “conduct”, it is perhaps better to stick merely with “duct-ing,” which implies movement in many forms: leading, guiding, directing, drawing, moving, running. The prison is an economy of groups or individuals (moving assemblages, more accurately) that are led or are leading, con-ducting, se-ducing, or pro-ducing classifications, normalization, and, overall, organizing the way actions lead actions to other actions. 59 Foucault, “The Subject and Power”; from Dreyfus, Hubert and Rabinow, Paul Michel Foucault: Beyond Hermeneutics and Structuralism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982. p. 222.

governed by another, more complex, relation…laid down on the same plane.”60 The planes can be the prison cell, the space in which the guard confronts or calls upon the prisoner, the prison yard that is always observed by authoritarian gazes, the prison as a whole, the penal section of the government, and on and on through overlapping systems nested in relations of movement. The prisons, schools, clinics, asylums, and modes of transportation are redrawn and re-colored by a new geography. In short, Foucault attempts to re-color the statements and surface effects of power and knowledge to understand how certain statements, orders, rules, etc. are deemed acceptable or not acceptable through practices on a certain plane, time or dimension.

Power and knowledge form a mutually supporting methodology that, do to its placement as the second moment in the overall diagrammatic process, I am calling cartography: the mapping of the marginalized movements, particles, voices, bodies, forces, affects and scenes as they are re-colored with a new palate on a plane of organization. While knowledge refers to all the effects, ideas, influences, procedures, tests, statements that are accepted in a given discourse, power refers to the mechanisms, technologies, and apparatuses utilized in institutions and other environments that guide thought, behavior, conduct, relations, and movements. Knowledge takes the form of a formal decree; contractual relations used to assign person, place, role, gender; or even a sidelong remark from the supervisor to the guard; and power is the assignation of fixed place, definite location in a cell or guard tower, or any orientation for the analytical use of

60 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 254.

space and time. The emphasis of cartography does not hinge on whether something is legitimate, fair, democratic, moral, or objectively rational.

[P]ower and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. These power/knowledge relations are to be analyzed, therefore, not on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is free in relation to the power system, but, on the contrary, the subject who knows, the objects to be known and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of power/knowledge and their historical transformations. In short, it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power/knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge.61

A penal statement, such as the enunciation of the delinquent or the abnormal individual,62 can only be accepted as knowledge-laden if it meets and fits the limits and requirements of the penal field in which it appears. Only certain people, in certain locations, at certain times, dressed in certain ways, accredited by certain forces, can articulate knowledge. Thus, taking both the archaeological methodology and the genealogical methodology together forms a Foucauldian cartography that must produce connections, links, and configurations of knowledge in power and power in knowledge, inextricably interlocked and mutually presupposed. Foucault concentrates on a few historical and institutional practices in which power and knowledge are clearly intertwined (although knowledge and power are intertwined in all institutional practices).

This hybridization takes place in a peripatetic grid (a predominant snapshot of a historical period) populated by affective discursive and non-discursive practices that function as a

61 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 28. 62 For further clarification of what Foucault means by ‘delinquent’ or ‘abnormal individual’, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish pp. 251-256 and Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at eh College de France 1974-1975. Eds. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana; English Srs. Ed., Arnold I. Davidson; Trans. Graham Burchell. NY: Verso, 2003, chapter five, respectively.

flatbed plane (an intensive, mutating surface of analysis) on which heterogeneous components are gathered and organized, and which are then assembled so as to isolate specific historical problems, such as madness during the Enlightenment or the emergence of modern penal institutions. Foucault, then, inverts and destabilizes an alternative reading of historical sequences in order re-map these proceedings in another manner.

3. Cartography is Only the Second Moment in the Full Application of

Diagrammatics

Since the archaeological focus on the discursive elements in the operations of prisons in modern society, Foucault has sharpened his focus and his distinctions and shed more light and color on the localization of power and knowledge as it appears in the movements, affects, morphogenetic processes, and intensities reciprocally determining each other. Through the explication of these methodological tools, a Foucauldian cartography can play the role of the second moment of diagrammatics, the transformational moment.

With the explication of the two most widely recognized and effective methodological tools of the Foucauldian toolbox now finished, archaeology and genealogy or articulabilities and visibilities, it is time to peer further into the workings of cartography and its place within an overall diagrammatic methodology. The second moment of diagrammatics, the creation of maps and alternative histories, hints at some tools and concepts that are not directly utilized by Foucauldian cartographies but certainly open up enough space for some dynamic movements. These concepts and movements are features and principles of a diagram that Deleuze and Guattari call

abstraction, affects, lines of flight or cutting edges of deterritorialization, and the outside.

Although these terms may initially seem to be simply esoteric terms without much content, it is my contention that the creation of this new set of tools is very useful for the diagrammatic process. There will first be a discussion of abstraction, which is quite different from the traditional kind of abstraction in which a particular is identified and subsumed as a member of a more general class or category, and more of a process of becoming-different as one taps into the potential of the diagrammatic outside. In this discussion the notion of micro populations subtending large, state-sanctioned aggregates will begin to emerge. Following the explanation of diagrammatic abstraction, the static identities that are often attributed to the heterogeneous parts of a diagram will transform into populations of affects. Finally, the Deleuzian-Guattarian conception of lines of flight or cutting edges of deterritorialization will take stage as the definitive, intensive characteristics of diagrams. It is this primacy on these heralded lines of flight that indicates the differences between Foucault and Deleuze, and, I believe, thus necessitates

Deleuze in this discussion. We will now begin to explicate these tools and concepts through some of the Foucauldian ideas already mentioned before leading forth into a full- blown explication of the third moment, the diagrammatic moment. It is this transition, the movement from the second to the third moment, that further differentiates diagrammatics from static models of philosophy

It is now appropriate to further elaborate the concept of diagrammatic abstraction.

First, a technical definition of a diagram: a diagram is an abstract, detached, unformed and non-formalized presentation, transmission, distribution, or synthesis of processes that

are effectuated, for example, in Foucault’s mappings, and that power and knowledge both presuppose, albeit in very different ways. One of the most important elements of the definition, the notion of “abstraction,” should not be interpreted as a way of picking up on the traditional use of the concept, but should call to mind some of the ways that abstraction is used in modern and postmodern art. For Deleuze, abstraction is not an idealization to some transcendent, immaterial, and unreal form; rather, abstraction conveys a break with linearity, a step away from the top-down ordering of hierarchical structures at work in societal practices, a turn from the verticality of representation and traditional metaphysics to the horizontalization of historical sequences through the placement of multiple networks of power and knowledge side by side with each other.

To abstract is to become-different, to become-other, to map a line of escape from the apparatus of capture ordering the territories and social configuration on which movements are captured, classified, and striated, and develop an intensive plane of pure movements and intensities.

While knowledge, as a form of capture, hinges on the stratification or ossification of statements as they pass through forms of discourse appearing along social strata or formations, and power, as Foucault uses the notion, is an “instituted and reproducible relation of force, a selective concretization of potential,”63 potentiality (or a second sense of ‘power’64) as Deleuze uses the notion, concerns only forces, affects, lines of flight,

63 Massumi, Brian, “Notes of the Translation and Acknowledgements” in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. xvii. 64 Brian Massumi, the English translator of A Thousand Plateaus, describes the different uses of the word ‘power’ in French. “two words for ‘power’ exist in French, puissance and pouvoir. In Deleuze and Guattari…Puissance refers to a range of potential. It has been defined by Deleuze as a “capacity for existence,” “a capacity to affect or be affect,” “a capacity to multiply connections that may be realized by a given ‘body’ to varying degrees in different situations. It may be thought of as a scale of intensity or fullness of existence (or a degree on such a scale), analogous to the capacity

intensities, and multiplicities, the distinct elements of a diagram. While diagramamticians and cartographers diagram and map through the use of different conceptual tools,

Foucault, a full-time cartographer and part-time diagrammatician, uses the notions of knowledge and power to indicate the subtending diagram that reveals the intensive potentiality (power in the second sense) in movements in the virtual register. A diagram knows only intensive processes and movements, twists and turns, flashes, tensions, condensation and expansion, speeds and slownesses, the unstable and irreducible transmission of particle-affects. Diagrams map the abstract patterns of the organization of singularities as they cross thresholds of application in different environments. At certain points, there are abrupt shifts in organization, in which the patterns of behavior of certain meshworks65 rearrange themselves and give rise to different formations or complexities. Although Foucault certainly focuses on institutional analysis, going to great lengths to depict the workings of the prison, the political economy of forces and movements cannot be reduced to a single institution. Since the prison reveals definite patterns of behavior, the prison is quite exemplary for cartographic analysis, but is not absolutely identical or coextensive with a diagram. Rather, the behavior of guards, prisoners, and other penal-assemblages in a prison formation are simply repeated instantiations of certain abstract patterns that are actualized, or stratified, in multiple domains besides the prison domain.66 For now, however, we will stick with the penal

of a number raised to a higher ‘power’…[P]uissance pertains to the virtual…pouvoir to the actual…[They] use poivoir in a sense very close to Foucault’s, as an instituted and reproducible relation of force, a selective concretization of potential.” Massumi, Brian, “Notes of the translation and Acknowledgements” in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus p. xvii. 65 For more elaboration on the exact definition of ‘meshworks’ see DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. 66 This is why Foucault shows how the changes in the prison are akin to the patterns of behavior of schools, the military, and hospitals. “It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distributions of individuals in relation to one

analysis since this is the example that Foucault most explicitly develops in Discipline and

Punish.

In the prison, diagrammatics rigorously yet anexactly defines the existence and the distribution of prisoner-assemblages as the cone of light falling upon them from the central watchtower affects them. More specifically, the emergence of assemblages in which the prisoner comes into contact with forms of power – be it the hand of the guard laid upon the back of the prisoner as they guide each other down the stone hallway of the prison, or the slivers of light as they peer through the slits of the prison cell – reveal the effectuation of a diagram, the concretization of patterns of behavior. Diagrammatics, then, studies the production of visibilities at the micro-level. Power is an art of microphysics, absolutely particular, local yet non-localizable, diffused and mobile, differentiated and multiplicitous, integrated and duplicitous, the potentiality evolving beneath the involution of a predominant formation. Major terms, by contrast with micro singularities, are commonly accepted sociological, historical, political, or philosophical categories that are used as foundational stones upon which State structures are built.

These categories – human, god, reason, beauty, truth, money – are passed through unbalanced relations only because there is the production of power relations at each level

– the reformational, religious, enlightened, aesthetic, logical, monetary. Stratification

“consist[s] of giving form to matters, of imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of…redundancy… Strata are acts of capture, they are like ‘black holes’ or

another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, and prisons. Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behavior must be imposed, the panoptic schema may be used.” Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 205.

occlusions striving to seize whatever comes within their reach…The strata are judgments of God.”67 Diagrammatic relations are actualized or stratified through attaining a certain level of stability in that they assume concrete form and functionality through divergent veins that spread through the reception of light – the power to be affected – and the spontaneity of the practicing assemblage – the power to affect. Each institutional formation invokes the regularity of the statement and the transmission of the scene; that is, the statement is a curve functioning along multiple levels, at different speeds and with different valuations; and the descriptive scenes of visibility are patterns, differential relations, and speeds that appear in different domains. Both statements and visibilities, however, envelop the abstract processes insisting in the outside, an immanent yet unformed and non-formalized space of potentialities (power in the second sense) that gets integrated and actualized by forms of articulability and visibility. As Deleuze puts it: the visibilities or “description-scenes and statement-curves are two heterogeneous forces of formalization and integration.”68

Differential particles, the abstract matter of intensitve populations of movements caught by description-scenes and statement-curves exist at both the macro level and at the micro level, where, at the macro level, the particle gets identified, stamped, and ordered in terms of the given system of coding on a scale of higher to lower; similarly, at the micro level, an assemblage of particles is abandoned, subject to no standard, freely composing its own identity, but an identity that is utterly imperceptible. In short, micro- particles are minor populations of movements and speeds that get stratified into different

67 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 40. 68 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 80.

extents, giving rise to major aggregates. In the example of the prison, the collections of processual-particles and moving body parts – the movement of an arm, a leg, a chest, or the skin; the firing of neurons, a strand of mucus, a swirl of excrement, a trail of blood, a pile of clothes or memories, etc. – that are recognized as a elements of a prisoner assemblage fulfills a given hierarchical ordering. The prisoner, as an aggregated, striated whole, is what it is because of its position in the operative schemes of visibilities and articulabilities. Opening the seal of the envelope, peering into the abstract level, the assemblage of particles is a moving network of elements yet existing anonymously, lacking capture and codification. The arm, for example, is not only a member of the categorically defined class of arms, but a differential collection of affects. Here is a temporary definition of an arm: an arm is what it is affecting and being affected by, the potentialities for action, the things that it can perform, the connections it establishes, the thresholds it crosses, the transformations it undergoes. The arm is certainly an arm in the sense of an expression of the classificatory capture of particles and placement into clearly defined systems, but the expression, to be sure, is not reducible or assimilable to the becoming of all arms. For the potentiality for new affects is infinite, always more than we know. “We know nothing of what a body is until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.”69

69 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 257.

Now that the notion of abstraction in the specific Deleuzian sense has been elaborated, it is possible to look further at the qualities and characteristics of the abstract material. The abstract matter consists or insists of populations of affects or some indefinable multiplicitous something, an aliquid, that is, indefinable in term of the traditional stock of concepts and categories. Systems of reference, categorical manifestations, and rigid stratification, presuppose the imperceptible workings of contractions of affects, entire spatio-temporal collections of affects and the differential interrelations reciprocally determining and being determined by affects. The reason why the collections of affects escape or at least break the bounds of the categories employed in closed systems is because the instantiation and stabilization of categories, or any mode of capture and reduction to stasis, tend to cover up the imperceptible murmurs and movements that are captured, identified, compared, contrasted, and normalized, normalized, normalized. There is always an aliquid – a something – between the words and processes that are the arm-assemblage that “insists”, rather that exists, through each manifestation, but escapes each and every one of them. The arm, then, or any processual- particle, is a pure multiplicity of affects, an asubjective, asignifying, non-hierarchical process; a moving particle that is a poly-affective composition of heterogeneous lines and variable movements among which there is no possibility for fixed categorical assimilation. This is not to say, however, that the particle as process is a hidden, unitary essence lying behind its manifestations, but is, rather, a moving plurality or assemblage slipping through the forms of classification and stratification, an assemblage of affects or multiplicity immanent to, yet enveloped by, the representation of general aggregates. An

arm is multiple arm-movements; each particle is multiple particles; each process is a temporary contraction of prior and future processes embedded on paradoxical planes of consistency. The arm, as moving intensive affects and processes, is pure nonsense; yet, by virtue of this fact, it produces sense and becomes meaningfully manifested on different planes simultaneously.70 The arm is a tool, a support, a weapon, an instrument, a pillow, a brush, a material object, a pragmatic function, a mystery, an appendage, and an infinite number of other things yet reducible to none. An arm is always in excess, dependent on the assemblages into which it enters yet not reducible to them; it is always more than the representation by words and scenes, it is a multiplicitous aliquid insisting at each accidental point of a plane. Caught in a description-scene or statement-curve, the arm is just an arm, but as an aliquid, as an imperceptible, moving multiplicity that is always in excess of imposed identities, is insists in the abstract outside, in the virtual register.

It is helpful to work through these concepts, always remembering that this is a challenge to think differently, to become-imperceptible, in order to fully grasp what is meant by a diagram. The process of diagrammatic abstraction is the movement to the outside, the place of the diagram. On the face of it, the outside immediately smacks of a hidden transcendence, a sad attempt at dissembling a philosophy of immanence due to the difficulties of accounting for change and becomings. Yet this outside is neither transcendent nor divorced from the obvious practices of the asylum or the prison, but is merely imperceptible to the recognition of linguistic representation, existing just outside

70 For more on the connection between sense and nonsense see Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale; Ed. Constantin V. Bounds. NY: Columbia University Press, 1990.

of the cone of visibilities, covered up by the redundancies of the tracings static identities and definitions or decalcomania71 yet always immanent in the workings of processes and intensities. In terms of the arm, the abstract processes of the arm belong to the immanent outside, a non-place of interactive dynamisms and morphogenetic processes, which later get covered up by apparatuses of capture of statements and visibilities. Just beyond the discursive and non-discursive thresholds, on the other side of the sieve of articulabilities and visibilities, are the subtending processes that escape capture, and thus necessitate an alternative history. In the attempt to open to the outside, to admit and herald the defined limits and unintended consequences of the established regimes of truth, a history of the muffled voices and unseen movements at play in the margins and the gutters of social strata needs to be specified and elaborated. Foucault, then, has initiated an early moment in a diagrammatic process by providing a preliminary plane of alternative routes that transforms the identifiable terms and structured elements by reversing hierarchical orders.

“Primary” terms and figures are replaced by the “supplementary.” Yet his early inversion is not meant to hold in place for long. When the terms are flipped and the order is reversed, the circulation of forces and materials does not stop. Rather the hold of intensities and multiplicities are severed and the movement and becoming of the arm, to keep with the example, is set free. In terms of Foucault’s analysis, power is not identifiable or coextensive with a single set of forms (the prison or the asylum), but

71 According to John Protevi’s Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary, decalcomania is “the mimetic process of lifting a code, image, or text from one medium, then transferring it to another without transforming it; the practice of tracing or representation DG [Deleuze and Guattari] oppose to cartography.as decalquer means ‘to transfer’, dacalcomanie is the mania of transference; DG’s reason for using this odd term appears to be an effort to poke fun at the ‘manic’ nature of tracing what amounts to nothing more than a decal….A clear example of dacalcomania is the transfer of genes through cloning, the process of making a perfect genetic copy.” Bonta, Mark and Protevi, John. Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004., p. 75.

moves in all directions, operating from the outside to the inside and from the inside to the outside, from the top to the bottom and from the bottom to the top, vertically, horizontally, diagonally, orthogonally. There is a leveling of concretized features and functions down to a full plane of interacting and heterogeneous forces. Once the findings of Foucault’s cartographic methodology have been elaborated, and the structural processes and operations have been opened up, the motor or machine, as Deleuze and

Guattari use the term, that generate strata can be explored. This machine is the diagram72 churning away in the imperceptible recesses of the outside.

This outside is the non-site that is excluded by the decalcomaniacal redundancies of the same traditional, fixed structures of putatively self-evident histories. As we have said, the only reason for referring to such an area as the outside is to retain the notion of lying just beyond, or always exceeding, the confines of the operative discourses and institutions. The outside is excluded from the social strata, unrecognizable to the structural functioning of the penal discourse, and imperceptible to the set of visibilities.

In the example of the prison, the outside is the presentation of intensities, movements, and affects; while the inside, to push the metaphor, is the capture of these features of the outside by categorization, identification, resemblance, analogy, in short, stratification.

Yet the outside is wholly immanent, a circulation of forces erupting at each point in institutional practices, and is more of a “rhythmic behavior…[that] generate[s] from

72 Deleuze and Guattari have many other names for my conception of a diagram, such as ‘abstract machine’, ‘quasi- causal operator’, and ‘object=x’. It is worth noting, however, that the diagram, as the concept is depicted in A Thousand Plateaus, is not actually synonymous with these other terms; rather, a diagram, is a phase portrait of an abstract machine or quasi-causal operator as it operates in the virtual register. But this terminological distinction does not detract from the use of the concept as it appears in my work.

within.”73 The outside does, then, communicate with the stratifications and formations of the prison and the asylum; in fact, they follow the same abstract rhythm, thus making the relation between the two more of a non-relation, an irreducible communication that occurs in the interstice in which an effervescent “abstract storm”74 that gets enveloped by the spread of visibilities and articulations emerges in shape of historical formations. The place of the outside is the non-place of pure difference, of the dismemberment of truth and repression, of the dissolution of the prison and the asylum.

In Foucault’s cartographies the alternative routes revealed through the splintering of histories are what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “lines of flight.” These lines lead into the abstract potentiality that is covered up by predominant historical narratives.

Mapping the lines of flight leading to the outside burns through the haze of sedentary strata and into the vertiginous zone of imperceptibility that destabilizes all stratifications and formations. The outside evolves at the fraying edges of the map, the unformed and undetermined non-place that effectively constitutes the outside of governed territories, and it is there that we strive through thought, it is the non-representative, a-signifying, non-narrative skin of the desert.75 History emerges at just those junctures at which cartographic depictions change and become something more, when the cry of the mad man can be heard and the hue of the prisoner’s body can be seen in all their intensities. It is from the non-space of the outside that history, society, assemblages, institutions, man, the Other, systems, and codifications emerge at greater and lesser speeds and rhythms.

73 De Landa, A Thousand Years Of Nonlinear History. 74 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 82. 75 Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel. W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p. 82.

Mapping reveals the thresholds of discourse and practices, the points of breaking down and stuttering, so as to provide future determinations and direct sensations of creative thinking. “If seeing and speaking are forms of exteriority, thinking addresses itself to an outside that has no form. To think is to reach the non-stratified. Seeing is thinking, and speaking is thinking, but thinking occurs in the interstice, or the disjunction between seeing and speaking.“76 Wherever there is a paradox, a crossing of forces or wills, a site of resistance, a murmur of transformation, wherever there are points of destabilization and deformation, when the whole formation is capable of changing, there are micro- intrusions of the force of the outside, of the force of becoming. To force of the outside, interstitial thought, can take the form of a prison revolt, of a denial of a predominant mode of existence, or a manipulation of ready-made modes of existence.77 The outside is defined by cutting edges of deterritorialization, the sharp precipices where words and things collide, when language stutters,78 when the blind spot fills the cone of vision.

Point by point, movement by movement, dominant formations break down like building blocks crashing to the ground. Despite the best attempts to manicure and trim the excess and unwanted foliage, weeds creep up through the cracks, while the cracks open up and become zips (Newman),79 precarious crags that jut out over the stratified skin of the sedentary modes of existence.

76 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 87. 77 The final chapter will provide a few aesthetic examples of harnessing these forces of becoming. 78 For more on exactly what Deleuze means by ‘making language stutter,’ see Deleuze “He Stuttered” in Deleuze, Gilles. Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 107-114. 79 See my Zips: Experimental Lines of Flight for more on how Barnett Newman’s zips can be interpreted as figural tools used to call up an outside that is only an outside of an inside, and immanent outside, an outside that lacks hierarchical order, an outside that is full of rumbling multiplicities of creation present by their very irreconcilability with representational thinking and painting, an outside that is full of potentialities for experimental immersion.

Such a landscape is always “local and unstable,”80 constantly and simultaneously pulled in many directions. Forces of destabilization or deterritorialization conflict with the organization of bodies and material. While there is an internal cause drawing a continuous and contiguous web between the cells of a prison and the stalls of the schoolhouse bathroom, there are also forces seeping through the cracks of the penal walls or rushing beneath and over the stall partitions. This is the intensive process of deterritorialization, appearing along the lines of flight entangled in each institution yet flooding out of and beyond institutional boundaries at each swivel of the manager-guard- instructor’s gaze. With the establishment of the prison system are prison riots; with the institution of educational reforms come student walkouts; with the standardization of sterility in hospitals come the worst breakout of diseases. While Foucault thought that the imbrication of “heterogeneous forces…in assemblages of power, or micropowers” in terms of anonymous forces captured by institutions were primary in such a cartography,

Deleuze and Guattari believed that a “diagram [has] lines of flight that are primary, which are not phenomena or resistance or counterattack in an assemblage, but cutting edges of creation and deterritorialization.”81

Lines of flight or cutting edges of deterritorialization are alternatives, secret paths or over-flights, long strides past and passing the dominant linearity of a march of signs, of a march of prisoners in a chain gang along roadsides and highways. The members of a chain gang are branded, to put it bluntly, by the apparatuses of penal discourses and practices. When one sees a line of similarly costumed men chained together cleaning up

80 Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. NY: Random House, 1978. 81 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 530-531 n. 39.

the detritus of the churning of societal assemblages, the prescribed response to such a sight is recalled and repeated. Even the casual observer passing by this punitive march can read the sign inscribed on the bodies and in the movements of the gang.

These convicts, distinguished by their ‘infamous dress’ and shaven heads, ‘were brought before the public. The sport of the idle and the vicious…they were encumbered with iron collars and chains to which bombshells were attached, to be dragged along while they performed their degrading service, under the eyes of keepers armed with swords, blunderbusses and other weapons of destruction.’82

Yet, with such established signs, such pure colors and shades, and the obvious responses to the signs marching along, come lines leading out, alternative options. There is the possibility of unintended response and mutiny on the highway. Lines of flight or cutting edges of deterritorialization are instances of breaking free from the numbing pattern of the passing scene of signs. Foucault sheds light on the simplicity of the chain gang that is normally only often quite subdued in traditional histories. Rather than simply mentioning the chain gang in a small footnote, Foucault explores the immanent conditions that gave rise to the appearance and practice of walking men chained to each other alongside the road, and brought the very tenors of the practice to vibrate with living consistency. Such ideas did not pop up out of nowhere, yet this questionable practice is assented to every time linear punitive practices are passed over by the rote repetition of tracings and traditional historical narratives. In this way, Foucault’s maps hint at the primary cutting edges, which cross and crisscross the repeated patterns and tracings of a typical historical education. Foucault provides a genealogy of alternative contours, other ways around the back, while always retaining the “trace of ‘torture’” or “mechanisms that make it possible

82 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 8.

to repress, to prevent, to exclude, to eliminate.”83 Sometimes the routes take longer; sometimes they are direct leaps that conjure up the past by creating the present; but they are certainly lines of flight. A “line of flight is like a tangent to the circle of significance and the center of the signifier,” “a thread to the system,” the crack in the foundation, the maps of the marauder, the thick haze of the threshold; straddling lines of acceptability and abnormality, the momentum of blazes.84 Writing Foucauldian histories, mapping new cartographies, are “lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and

Destratification,”85 alternative accounts, uncomfortable questions that unseat one’s most assented to foundations. By outlining a cartographic methodology that aims to uncover the voices and colors lost through the practice of tracing dominant historical pictures, and peering into the darkened chambers and opening up the locked adjacencies, Foucault is mapping a line of flight, skidding along and through the perfect boundaries of common historical territories.

Diagrammatics is an experiment in interactivity, of composing a new body, entering into new assemblages, creating lines of flight leading into the outside of the strata, openly constructing a new diagram; it is a movement away from rigid stasis to create dynamic, supple alliances that follow alternative patterns of behavior and rhythms that carry the momentum out of the predominant formation. By abstracting from the diversity of historical maps that Foucault has provided, following the lines of flights or alternative routes leading into the outside, and the movement to a conception of life and bodies in terms of affects, we have now fully smoothed the space for the beginning of the

83 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 16, 24. 84 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 116. 85 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 3.

third moment, the diagrammatic moment. This second, transformational moment has provided much of the material and many of the tools for complete diagrammatic analysis.

Yet despite the fervor a radical moves that were made in this chapter, the next chapter, although equally as radical and dynamic, will reveal the caution and skill required by diagrammatics. This cautionary tale has been the explication of the second moment of diagrammatics, the transformational moment. We are now in a position to carry on into the third moment; and it is there that we will next begin.

Chapter 3

The Speed of Thought and the Fall of the Die

This chapter, which corresponds to the third, the diagrammatic moment, is where things will really pick up speed. This moment is full of man things, of the sea and of dice, of segments and files, of lights and shadow. Yet despite the complex constellation of concepts contained in this chapter, especially since Foucault has done the work required by the second moment, there is a clear structure. Things will start off with what

I am calling diagrammatic apprenticeship. This process, a dynamic education, will be contrasted with the disciplinary societies of Discipline and Punish. Conceived in this way, learning is not the rote repetition of common sayings and dead metaphors, but is a plunge into Leibniz’s dark sea of uncertainty and novel experiences. This transformational endeavor is a direct encounter with a “dark precursor,” or that spark to thought that gets covered up by categories and redundant tracings. Involved in this educational process is a new conception of thinking, where thought is only creative, enlivening, and affirmative. Thinking, in this way, stems from the force of the dark precursor, which pushes the exercise of the faculties to their very ends, encouraging novel modes of existence. Yet despite the chaotic tenor of this apprenticeship, caution is necessary; for becoming a diagrammatician requires skill, discipline, and diligence. A diagrammatician must always be aware of the danger of fighting stratification,

62 63

normalization, and rigid segmentation. The center of this third moment is the

Nietzschean dice-throw, which has two sides: there is the rise of the dice, as the dice break away from the capture of the strata and disciplinary strata and lose their title as identities become anonymous populations of movements, which I will refer to as iacere; and then there is the fall of the die, the actualization of new planes of organization, and new styles of life. There will be a short trip through the changeover from Abstract

Expressionism to Neo-Dadaism in order to offer examples of the dice-throw.

Finally, this section will conclude with an analysis of the time of actualization, the creation of new ways of life and the emergence of unforeseen assemblages. This time of concretization of pure potentialities follows the three aspects of Deleuze’s notion of sufficient reason: the determinable, the undetermined, and the determined. After differentiating diagrammatics from some possible objections, such as the attribution of an axiomatic form, a Deleuzian analysis of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy will conclude a final section on making oneself a diagrammatician. Once all this is finished, the fourth and final chapter, the programmatic moment, will put the first three moments to work. For now, let us begin with diagrammatic apprenticeship.

1. Diagrammatic Apprenticeship

Following the lines of flight cutting edges and alternative paths leading into the outside are moments of leaping in place, flashes of a transformational education, apprenticeship, or learning. Learning is opposed to imitation or training, which are associated with disciplinary societies. In disciplinary institutions the student is

normalized through a process of tracing and imitation, the meticulous repetition of the same, effectuated by a hierarchized “mechanism for training.”86

Almost identical to the architectonics of the prisons, camps, and clinics, the landscape of disciplinary schools consisted of long corridors populated with observational cells distributed along the walls in equal series, according to many passages appearing in Discipline and Punish. Through regimentation and analysis, every movement was limned down to calculated measures, every meal followed strict regularity, every minute was divided so as to produce maximum efficiency out of every student-machine. Each pupil was assigned a title, starting with the first of the class, the primary assistant to the supervisor-instructor, and down along the line to the very last, which, in turn, served as the last point in a localized secretion of order and training.

Every element of the educational institution was

subject to a whole micro-penalty of time (latenesses, absences, interruptions of tasks), of activity (inattention, negligence, lack of zeal), of behavior (impoliteness, disobedience), of speech (idle chatter, insolence), of the body (‘incorrect’ attitudes, irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness), of sexuality (impurity, indecency).87

Individuals are differentiated and compounded according to systems of rank and hierarchy, quantitatively ordered in terms of skill, ability, level and nature. In short, the educational “institution compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes…normalizes,” reterritorializes.88 Moving pupil-particles are stripped of any prior significance, sterilized so that any bridge to prior habits and functions is severed, leaving only a set of empty machines that can be filled, oiled, and reassembled through

86 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 172. 87 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 178. 88 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 183.

the programming of an artificial order. As the old military maxim goes, “we break them down only to build them back up again, as bigger, better, stronger” segments of a military machine. Students are deterritorialized, disassembled, disengaged, unfastened, and suspended, yet only to be reterritorialized, reassembled, reengaged, refastened, and reinserted in a perpetual disciplinary matrix of standardization and normalization. That is, students are broken down into segments, decoded and then recoded and reordered into a new totalizing system of tracing and correction that inserts the newly formed segments into a structural hierarchy of easily identifiable and manageable particles. No deviation from the asymmetrical linear order of the rigid segmentarity of the disciplinary machine can be tolerated. “It’s a question both of making the slightest departures from correct behavior subject to punishment, and giving a punitive function to the apparently indifferent elements of the disciplinary apparatus: so that, if necessary, everything might serve to punish the slightest thing; each subject finds himself caught in a punishable, punishing universality.”89

To break through the strata of the disciplinary machine it is helpful to see educational encounters as a field of forces, movements, challenges, and intensities. The two types of forces previously described, the spontaneous or active and receptive or reactive types of forces, although distinct from each other in terms of conceptual analysis, are equally forces. Each encounter and every relation has at least two sides to every encounter with the disciplinary machine, one acting and the other being acted upon. Such static training, such repetition of the same, such serialization, such rigid imposition of

89 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 178.

preformed modes of existence, numbs the sensibility, lulling the body into a codified set of functions that plug into the strata and feed on more of the same. This training, which upholds the rote repetition of the same movements in a process of normalization, however, is not learning.

In contrast to disciplinary training, learning is the nomadic process of passing among territories, the explosion, the eruption, or the seismic fluttering between bright and brighter. To learn is to construct a smooth line that stretches the cone of visibility or penal surveillance, irradiating unseen areas and unrecognizable milieus by the compulsion to think otherwise. Directional lines of escape are actualized in the process of learning, enabling unforeseen assemblages to transmute out of nowhere, out of anonymous material, “out of the shadow.”90 Since disciplinary training, through the envelopment of the dynamic processes subtending stratification, has formerly coded such problematic space of precarious crags and zigzagging lines unlivable, and learning is the nomadic beacon to the outside beyond the striated space of the prison and the asylum.

The experience of learning thus occurs at the “borders of the livable.”91 The land of the unlivable, the immanent outside, is smooth, not yet striated, a heterogeneous plane of intensities, a fluid space of diagonal waves and radical accents. While disciplinary training is exemplary of the reiteration of tracing, learning is an apprenticeship in diagrammatics; for the life of the diagrammatic apprentice is always in between strata, always caught in a modular zone of becoming, it is the rhythm of the intermezzo.

Transformative, threshold enduring, supple apprentices are fluid and protean enough to

90 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomilson and Graham Burchell. NY: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 66. 91 Deleuze, Gilles Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. NY: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 118.

sustain the “thunder and lightning” 92 of life while crossing the path of the unlivable; they are experimenters, adventurers wandering into the sea of the problematic. Rather than merely consuming and imposing ready-made problems and previously determined distinctions, and the order, rule and hierarchy of normalization, learning is the “essential apprenticeship.”93 The solution is not true or false, not a simulacral member of this or that category, and remaining at the level of preformed rejoinders obfuscates the pure difference covered up by the instantiation of resemblances, contradictions, analogies, and identities. Diagrammatic apprenticeship prevents the solution from covering up the problem, always allowing the problem to guide itself not to some absolute end that is reified and blindly repeated, but to question the problem itself, to set in motion a swirl of endless problematics. Learning involves the evolution of problems, the turning of solutions upside down in order to apprehend the conditions that provide the possibility for the bright flash of the problem.

Leibniz, Deleuze often notes, uses the example of learning to swim in the sea.94

The student-swimmer must not merely imitate the teacher through repetitive movements, nor represent what might occur when one’s body becomes completely immersed in the sea. Rather the open-ended immersion is the key, a categorically neutral plunge, and the dissolution of the self and pre-given solutions in terms of a conjugation with the sea at every particular curve of the sea, with every possible relation. When finally submerged in the sea, it is futile to try to recollect what came before, it is otiose to try to fight against

92 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 118. 93 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 164. 94 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 163.

a pressure that attacks by retreating to ready-made solutions, for the sea is an assemblage of anabasis. There is a violent “education of the senses.”95

Learning is not the imposition of a set of preformed axioms or eternal laws on a passive materiality, but the ability to remain open to the energetic dynamisms of the problematics of the sea. That is, the sea is wholly active, a dynamic heterogeneous assemblage of complex relations of movements and rapidities; and it is the task of the diagrammatic apprentice to remain open to the morphogenetic capabilities of the problem at hand.96 In short, as De Landa puts it, “learning is a matter of doing, or by interacting with and adjusting to materials, machines, and models, experimentalists progressively discern what is relevant and what is not in a given experiment.”97 Thus, given the interactivity and reciprocal contribution of both the apprentice and the problem, of both the swimmer and the sea, there is even the possibility for the creation of new faculties, of new aptitudes, of new abilities. By taking the faculties to their respective thresholds, to the point of bifurcation, when they turn over and leap across their own doorstep into the outside, they produce a fertile ground or supple earth that will be forced to generate new faculties, the faculties of the future. “We never know in advance how someone will learn…There is no more a method for learning than there is a method for finding treasures, but a violent training, a culture…which affects the entire individual.”98 Such

95 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 165. 96 Deleuze and Guattari give the example of a carpenter, “it is a question of surrendering to the wood, then following where it leads by connecting operations to a materiality instead of imposing a form upon a matter.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 408. 97 De Landa, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. NY: Continuum Books, 2002.p. 177. Emphasis in the original. 98 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 165.

transformational training, in opposition to normalizing training, is a violent encounter with what Deleuze refers to as the “dark precursor.”99

Despite the leaps and bounds Foucault made through the splintering of traditional historical narratives into multiplicities of alternative accounts, Foucault always remained within the bounds of the social. Deleuze, however, by noticing this spark to thought, this dark precursor that gives rise to the social formations explored by Foucault, leads further into the outside, allowing himself to find inspiration in bird songs. It is easy to forget the immeasurable collision with the dark precursor that is first intuited in the process of learning, especially when one depends on the reductive regimes of tracing and decalcomaniacal training; yet the dark precursor, the moment of afflatus that compels thought, disrupts the very ability of trained faculties to recognize and subsume the dark precursor under a common category, disputing the common envelopment of the abstract precursor under codified decals. Deleuze’s attention to this spark of life thereby improves on Foucault’s concepts.

The encounter with the dark precursor occurs along a life of flight leading in the outside, beyond the common strictures of categories and traditional images of thought.

Attention to this immeasurable collision leads one away from the serial lines that roll along the well-defined tracks and collect disparate molecules in bundles only to categorize the detritus into ready-made classes; for there is always a breaking point, a vertiginous feeling of standing in a black hole suspended neck-deep above the chaotic

99 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 119.

irreducible dimensions of an intensive threshold.100 In order to learn in the manner just described, as the faculties are raised to their respective thresholds, “[e]ach faculty must be borne to the extreme point of its dissolution, at which it falls prey to a multiple violence: the violence of that which forces it to be exercised, of that which it is forced to grasp and which it alone is able to grasp, yet also that of the ungraspable.”101 The faculties are forced to become active, to try to grasp at the random images of a revolving variegated kaleidoscope of potentialities, yet always unable to grasp them all. Moreover, the use of the faculties is not based on a premeditated decision to think, for the very emergence of what is normally recognized as the domains of imagination or memory, for example, presupposes a power, a force that provokes one to imagine or remember, a violence that forces a “becoming-active” of the faculties.102

Deleuze opens up to the violence of the dark precursor by diagramming lines of experimentation that lead away from the clearly limned territories of normalized philosophy and redundant tracings. For taking up a diagrammatic apprenticeship, like the sting of growing up, similar to the repeated experience of Dionysian death, is laborious and sometimes even harrowing; for learning “affirms the paints of growth” while disciplinary training “reproduc[es] the sufferings of individuation.”103

To conclude this section on diagrammatic apprenticeship we must refine the focus of diagrammatics, perhaps by taking a step back. Despite the turbulent images of transformational learning and the call for destratification, diagrammatics is not a blind

100 Barnett Newman’s “zips” are wonderful examples of this vertiginous feeling of the encounter with a threshold, limit, or point of bifurcation when formations and organizations changeover and become something totally different. 101 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 143. 102 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 108. 103 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 13.

plummet into the chaotic fervor of the outside. Not all stratification is bad; rather stratification is necessary to a certain degree, for to dive unheeded into the swarm of unformed functions and destratified forms is suicide. “Staying stratified – organized, signified, subjected – is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into a demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever.”104 Diagrammatics is a diligent craft, wielding not an overpowering and uncontrollable weapon but a tool of precision. Altering an old Nietzschean adage,

Deleuze cautions, “[y]ou don’t do it with a sledge hammer, you use a very fine file.”105

One doesn’t reach a smooth space by “wildly destratifying, but by slowly dismantling the predominant institutions and static coagulations piece by piece, inch by inch. One of the most important lessons is that an anabasis to a smooth space is not enough, for Deleuze warns to “never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.”106 Rather, it is a necessary step to understand that stratification is never complete, that material problems “typically survive the birth and death of new theories,” theoretical frameworks, categories, or preformed solutions. Put differently, it is not as if there were two categories, one bad and the other good, where tracings and decalcomania constitute the bad and cartography and diagrammatics characterize the good; rather, “[i]t is a question of method: the tracing should always be put back on the map.”107 The hope is to reveal the blockades, the rigid formations, and redundant impasses. It is possible to read these impasses by starting with the map, and that is exactly what we have done. “If it is

104 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 161. 105 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 160. 106 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 500. 107 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 13.

true of the essence of the map…to have multiple entryways, then it is plausible that one could enter them through tracings…assuming the necessary precautions are taken…”108

An initial cautionary goal of diagrammatics is to increase the degrees of freedom, to open up to future connections and interactions, to increase one’s power, to increase one’s capacity to form novel relations, to enter into unforeseeable assemblages.

2. Paradoxical Becomings

An image of philosophy that is dependent on the dominant role of recognition and representation, according to Deleuze, is a redundant and stultifying illusion that blocks creative transformation. By preventing any encounter with pure difference of the imperceptible outside, or that which is considered “other,” this image of thought sets in place the means for the hegemony of static identity over creativity. In contrast to such debilitating and reductive thinking, Deleuze opens up room for a vital encounter with the outside, the imperceptible movements lying beyond the common domain of the faculties.

Such a striking experience does not encourage attempts to reduce, identify, and categorize a shock to thought but opens up the possibility for problematization. Once the problem is seen in all its categorically neutral morphogenetic development, mostly because it escapes the solutions commonly associated with past experiences, combinations of creative expression result. Rather than tending towards a likely solution or final answer that would quell all worries and establish a general law that can be applied to all experience, the faculties employed in the encounter are altered to a point of

108 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 14.

utter discordance; a direct violence reverberates among the faculties, thereby forcing the faculties of thought to reach and step beyond their respective thresholds, where “[e]ach faculty is unhinged,”109 enabling the creative expressivity of new faculties. The understanding of the faculties as static forms that impose a clear and distinct order is then violated, located as a useful foothold but used only in order to open up the potentiality for future connections and interactions, to increase one’s power, to be able to augment one’s capacity to form novel relations, to enter into unforeseeable assemblages.

In the experience of the development of the faculty of sensibility, for example, the future potentialities for the use of the sensibility are actualized through pure experimentation, a push beyond a previously established conception of the sensibility.

Following a Deleuzian diagrammatic maneuver, we move beyond the strictures of the common use of the faculties to the beginning of experimentation; a movement beyond the suggested limits, a breaking away from the confines of the limiting image of recognition exemplified by tracing. This violent push hinges on the primacy of sensibility in

Deleuze’s writings. Recognition-mediated experience, a life of redundancies, presents familiar figures, only allowing for more of the same, but the diagrammatic use of the faculties is the embryonic experiment of the sensibility with difference in itself.

Diagrammatics harnesses the power of this violence, and finds itself caught up “in a rigorous struggle against this image…with no ally but paradox.”110

109 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 141. 110 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 132.

Through the sensation of the living impulse emerging from the outside, thought begins “under the impulse of a shock”111 of the dark precursor. As thought begins with this imperceptible shudder, “things are much more complicated and one finds that one is a [diagrammatician]112 before having understood why”; the important thing is to sense

“life, each living individuality, not as a form, or a development of form, but as a complex relation between differential velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles.”113 Thinking, as a becoming, is always amidst a milieu, already amongst a population of moving particles. It seems that understanding and recognition presuppose the exercise of the sensibility, one is already immersed in a plane of intensities and rapidities before one has the chance to nominate and categorize experience; there are always subterranean movements that are only distinguishable by degrees of intensities.

The prisoner, once he is freed of the shackles of his static identity, can spontaneously respond to the movements of the guard without recourse to the recognition of clearly stated laws; and the guard, correlatively, can respond and act upon the movement of the prisoner without running through proofs or perusing a law book. Both assemblages can be seen as entering into “a zone of proximity…rather than acquiring formal characteristics.”114 In the prison two velocities meet, each affecting and being affected by the other, the two assemblages of forces constituting a larger assemblage of differential speeds and movements. Prior to the assignation of function or the

111 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 132. 112 I have replaced ‘Spinozist’ with ‘diagrammatician’; yet this does not retract from the meaning of the quote. Rather, I have extended Deleuze’s notion of an alliance with past and contemporary thinkers, artists, scientists, etc. and placed myself at the end of the Deleuzian alliance of philosophers. 113 Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998, p. 123. 114 Deleuze, “Literature and Life” in Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 2.

determination of form, these constellations of particles produce complex relational rhythms, which exist, as intensive assemblages, “only when [they] discover beneath apparent persons the power of an impersonal…a singularity.”115 The site of the encounter produces a pendulating ribbon of speeds and affects that converge on the respective sensibilities pre-reflectively. After the fact, the faculties of understanding or recognition may reflect upon the attack on the senses and sort out the intensities into ready-made categories, thereby casting aside what is un-recognizable or totally different or what does not fit into the neat categorical boxes of the understanding. Yet prior to the reduction of the impulse into more of the same, the sensibility picks up on the imperceptible; that is, imperceptible to the categories of knowledge, recognition, or tracing.

The identity of the prisoner is left behind for monotonous application, the assimilation to the same, thereby enveloping the outside, barely noticing the subtle vibrations of implicated multiplicities. The diagram is a process, then, of becoming- imperceptible because it does not pay attention to formed substances and formalized functions: that is, the form of the prisoner and the guard captured by the penal formation; and the function of the prisoner as that which needs to be confined and guarded at all times, and the function of the guard as that which needs to be continuously observing and surveying the prisoner. Only from the perspective of the stratified identities and the subjectivities of these penal formations are diagrammatic features imperceptible. Most activity takes place at a pulse and rhythm that is either too great or too subtle for the

115 Deleuze, “Literature and Life” in Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 3.

apparatus of recognition, while recognition “merely expresses the relation of certain reactive forces to the active forces which dominate them. [Recognition] is essentially reactive; this is why we do not know what a body can do, or what activity it is capable of.”116 Recognition and understanding remain within their own self-imposed confines, refusing to follow the lines of flight cutting through the strata and leading beyond the ends of the faculties and into the chaosmos of the outside. Models of subjectifications, significance, and identity rely on their abilities to capture creative becomings and compare them to the same, concluding that the findings are opposed, analogical, identical, similar or equal to what is already detained by the understanding.

Breaking the rigid adherence to this image of thought by pushing the faculties to the nth degree is not, however, a waning nihilism or blatant relativism. It is, rather, a reworking of the notion of thinking by opening up to the ways in which sensation becomes crystallized into sets of identities, analogies, and the recognizable redundancies of tracings; that is, the dominant procedures of stratification. Deleuze observes that all societies, systems, etc, are segmented, which, at least given the common tendencies of contemporary capitalist societies, most often cuts up a block of anonymous sensations or affects into hierarchized classes and categories: income, class, race, filiations, aptitude, number, and all other overcoded territories.

These segments or categories can be organized in three ways: binarily, cyclically, and linearly. First, binarily, the major, dominating classes, for example guards, are clearly coded or designated by the positioning of particles along certain axes, a certain

116 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 41. I have also replaced ‘consciousness’ with ‘recognition’ in the quite in order to retain the same vocabulary, yet this does not distract from the force of the quote.

manner of talking, the use of particular words in certain ways in different places and times; contrarily, the supplementary elements, such as the prisoners, must also dress alike, talk alike, and move alike, so as to ensure the smooth functioning of the punitive machine. Apparatuses of articulation often capture and operate by way of binaries.

Secondly, the bare unformed matter of anonymous particles and speeds are caught in zones of visibility and circles of relevance: from the prison to the asylum to the increasing pervasiveness of the domains of collected cones of light that reveal bodies and assemblages through every plane of public life space117 are coded and striated through revolving circles visibility. While the most obvious cases concern the rigid delineations of the prison and the asylum, with the appropriative tools of the capitalist machine – hidden cameras, detailed reports, video recordings, public proclamations, etc. – modern societies spread out along dense lines of communication and conflict from the private affairs of individual citizens to the most public affairs of the economy and the government. In short, serialization produces a society of bodies habitually obsessed with producing and purchasing the heralded same. Finally, for the operation of the serial production of identities there must also be the regulation and organization of space along a linear grid of segmented parts, along an endless spiral of tasks and duties.

[A]s soon as we finish one proceeding we begin another, forever proceduring or procedured, in the family, in school, in the army, on the job. School tells us, ‘You’re not at home anymore’; the army tells us, ‘You’re not in school anymore’…Sometimes the various segments belong to different individuals and groups, and sometimes the same individual and group passes from one segment to another.118

117 Both Deleuze and Foucault do go into detailed discussions of the organization and normalization of time, which, in itself, is a very interesting discussion. But, do to the confines of the paper, I will not venture into the details of that topic. 118 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 209.

The binary division into classes, roles, genders, species, and categories, the collection of concentric and overlapping circles of visibility, and the linear normalization of spatial movement, all work together as a social machine resonating in terms of the production of homogenous identities that appear at each juncture in society as “just one thing after another.”119 Stratification is the production, sale, and purchase of recognizable objects with rigid edges, clear boundaries, and redundant identities.

Through such normalizing procedures as the triple segmentation just mentioned, each body is coded and valued as it is measured against the societal standard dominant at the time, which has recently been a monetary standard. That is, a body only has meaning if it is easily assailable into manageable classes that can be bought and sold according to different strategies. As Foucault has so elegantly elaborated, power and control is more microphysical than macrophysical. The control of society and nature is effectuated primarily in terms of the minor connections of bodies to bodies, of reciprocal affection, of particular choices and habits. From the ways one moves, the ways one buys, the ways one enjoys, the time one works, the words one says, the clothes one wears, everything is overcoded, decoded, and recoded by the resonance of complicity. The homogenization of particles, the normalization of behavior, and the production of identities and significance, occurs at each infinitely irreducible micro-position. At one and the same time, there is the beacon of a binary gender – man/woman – but, correspondingly, there is the micro-political collection of a million minor genders that comply with the pervasive engineering of a macro political machine producing only two. Although there is always a

119 This is a famous phrase used by the minimalist artist Donald Judd.

plurality, complicity in conjunction with serialization of duality results in only two of a kind.

4. A Throw of the Die and the Construction of a Diagram

[T]he true undertaking of thought will be to bring it as close to itself as possible; the whole of modern thought is imbued with the necessity of thinking the unthought…of making explicit the horizon that provides experience with its background of immediate and disarmed proof, of lifting the veil of the Unconscious, of becoming absorbed in its silence, or of straining to catch its endless murmur…Whatever it touches it immediately causes to move: it cannot discover the unthought, or at least move toward it, without immediately bringing the unthought nearer to itself – or even, perhaps, without pushing it further away, and in any case without causing man’s own being to undergo a change by that very fact, since it is deployed in the distance between them.120

This undertaking of thought is clearly seen in a few areas of Deleuze’s oeuvre in which he mentions the Nietzschean conception of a dice-throw. This vivid metaphor, which only appears on two or three pages of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is a perfect example of the movement of the diagrammatic moment. This movement, the throwing of the die and the fall of the die are the two sides of the third moment. The rise of the dice along the arc of the throw is a way of conceiving of the breaking of the forms of stratification, segmentation, and normalization, while the return of the die is the actualization of new modes of organization. Now that many elements of diagrammatics have been explicated, it is time to peer into the inner workings of the dice-throw. We begin with the pluralism characteristic of forces.

Relations are always plural, evolving and changing pluralities, the joyful exclamation of multiplicity and pluralism. Pluralism is necessary in order to overcome the reductive tendency of tracing over the same identities, of the negative assimilation of

120 Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. Ed. R.D. Lang. NY: Vintage Books, 1970, p. 327.

serialization. Serialization and tracing level out all differences so that each production perfectly resembles the next leaving “just one thing after another,” and teaches individuals to pay the closest attention to the fine details of every commodity. Since every Ikea couch and every Ford automobile is basically an exact replica of the one that came before and the one that will come after, there is a homogenized pining for immaculate consumption, for the pristine vendible. The perfect consumer is the “obtuse spectator, the pathological moralizing listener who counts on it to ensure the proper functioning of his moral sublimations and medical purgings.”121 A diagrammatician, by contrast, “is not to be found in this anguish or disgust, nor in a nostalgia for unity,” for it

“is only to be found in multiplicity in the diversity of affirmation as such.”122 What characterizes the diagram “is the joy of multiplicity, plural joy.”123

While cartography is a symptomology, a transformational movement that maps out the changes and inner workings of the words and things that are predominant in a particular social institution, diagrammatics abstracts even further. Diagrammatics abstracts to the outside. The best way of conceiving of this unique kind of abstraction is to think of the difference between meteorological mappings and the territorial maps that appear in elementary geography textbooks. The typical textbook series of maps are, in fact, not mappings in the Deleuzian sense of the concept; rather they are tracings. The jutting, squared, rounded territorial lines separating nations, states, countries, or provinces are decalcomoniacal slides that reinforce military boundaries and predominant formations. The lines separating states are tracings, re-productions, and stencils. In

121 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 17. 122 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 17. 123 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 17.

contrast to tracings, diagrams are more akin to meteorological depictions of pressure zones, wind patterns, and storm movements. Diagramming the flows and patterns of wind assemblages does not offer the semblance of capturing such intensity, rather such complex collections of forces indicate points of extreme intensity, places of change-over and bifurcation, the thresholds at which bands of temperature begin to swirl amongst themselves and crossover, bifurcating, becoming-hurricane. Thus, as Deleuze himself said of Leibniz, diagrammatic abstraction “expreses[s] problems which could not hitherto be solved or, indeed, even posed…”124 Foucault, a cartographer, strips away self- evidences and other positivities to create a stage populated by folly, violence, disorder, exclusion and confinement; and Deleuze, a diagrammatician, tears down the stage, bares the characters of their clothes, names, faces, bodies, and souls, and leaves only off-stage abstract machines presenting the transmission of particles through affective relations.

For, as Foucault himself said of Deleuze, “there is no heart, but only a problem – that is, a distribution of notable points; there is no center but always de-centerings, series, from one to the other, with the limp of a presence and an absence of an excess, of a deficiency.”125 Deleuze is the diagrammatic “player [who] temporarily abandons himself to life and temporarily fixes his gaze upon it; the artist [who] places himself provisionally in his work and provisionally above it.”126 The movements of withdrawal and immersion are the two moments of diagrammatics. But what exactly are these two moments?

Echoing the arc and return of the Nietzschean dice-throw, the sedimented content

(static entities, given identities, deeply ingrained modes of existence, the prison

124 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 25. 125 Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” p.1. 126 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 24.

formation, the characters of the mad man and homo medicus, etc) of both the tracing and the map is thrown away from the diagram, brushed off a smooth surface, cast up to the sky; the predominance of the stratified formations are lost, the codes of ordering are scrambled, the strict lines of segmentation are spun into an endless arc, and the possibility for a life of creative becoming is ushered in. This first moment is the transformation of static contents and formations, which is most clearly experienced in the metamorphosis of the sub-ject and ob-ject into the single act of throwing: iacere.127 As the debris of identities, subjectivities, and significance fall back to earth, unformed matter and non- formal functions rise up to the celestial table, that is, the diagram. This is a return to multiplicity, the movement of thought at infinite speeds. Upon reaching the sky, once installed on the diagram, only a plane of vectors remains: lines of magnitude and direction, throwings.

In the concretized punitive formation the prisoner and guard could only relate and connect in certain ways, for they had to maintain the structure of the strata and order of the hierarchy. Their training had dulled their sensibility to such an extent that they could only pay attention to the well-worn pathways and identities that were clearly delineated for them. With the diagram, however, individuals are no longer simply fixed members of a society, institution, or category in general, but singularities in diagrammatic multiplicities; individuals are continuous variations emerging from a plane of organization. The prisoner and the guard escape from themselves; they find themselves freed of the constraints of the prison formation and enter a zone of indiscerniblility. It is

127 Iacere is the preset active infinitive meaning, “to throw” in Latin.

in this sense that there is a successful becoming, the entrance of two multiplicities onto a smooth innominate space. Anonymous blocks of sensation, formerly the guard and the prisoner, swim through each other, becoming one with the landscape. This passage into the imperceptibility of the outside allows the prisoner and the guard to exclaim: “[w]e are not in the world, we become with the world.”128

The second moment, then, is the falling back to earth or the effectuation of a virtual multiplicity in concrete assemblages, of the selection from a continuum of potentialities and the concretization of new modes of existence, new possibilities for life.

When the unformed matter and non-formed functions that speed along the sky ridge at different rapidities take on form and function in a discourse and an institution; that is, they take on forms of articulabilities and visibilities. When the modes of existence and potentialities that were created by the diagram in the first moment can give rise to new formations, chance is affirmed on all fronts as the dice fall back to earth in a different order and according to a different style of consistency.

The second moment, the time of concretization of potentiality,129 “has neither beginning nor end but only a milieu,”130 it always begins in the middle and only subsequently finds traces of continuity where there are actually only gapping fissures and points of resistance. A diagram is actualized in many institutions simultaneously: for example, the panoptic diagram becomes actualized in the prison, in the school, and in the

128 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 169. 129 Actualization, integration, and solution are basically synonymous with effectuation or concretization. Similar terms in Deleuze’s oeuvre are not exactly synonymous, but to hedge as Manuel De Landa does, Deleuze, “instead of building one theory, are attempting to create a meshwork of theories, that is, a set of partially overlapping theories. Hence nearly synonymous terms… do not exactly coincide in meaning but are slightly displaced from one another to create this overlapping effect. The point remains that the referents of these labels, not the labels themselves, are what matters. ” De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, p. 330 n. 2. 130 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 110.

army, and, as will become apparent in the case study in the fourth chapter, in every contraction of movements and gazes in different milieus. Due to the combination of abstract particles, the diagram created new ways of relating, new worlds of actualities.

The second moment of the diagram, “[w]hen the dice are thrown on the table of the earth

[and] it ‘trembles and is broken,”131 is the effectuation of diagrammatic features. The multiplicities of movements and intensities disassembled, broken, and recast in a single throw; chance is affirmed all at once. There is no recourse to a higher transcendent domain that would provide a view from nowhere, a position where everything is fully present.132 Rather, Deleuze’s conception of space is the curvature of movements, the instantaneous rates of change, speeding across and through themselves. The effectuation or actualization of diagrammatic features, in short, “is a local integration or a local solution which connects with others in the overall solution of the global integration.”133

The set of intensive movements turning around and constituting a local space give birth to a certain manner of organization. From the chaos of the outside emerges a plane of organization on which differential elements appear as this or that type of thing, in reciprocally determining orders of formation.

Sometimes the concrete assemblages effectuated by the diagram are still linked up with the transformational force of the outside; sometimes the sensibility is not completely

131 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 29. 132 This idea of refusing to move to a transcendent level beyond the behavior of intensities and singularities stems from the advancements in differential geometry as Bernhard Riemann and Freidrich Gauss developed it. Basically, Gauss moved beyond the old Cartesian method of extensively determining points on a two dimensional surface from a higher third dimension, a transcendent dimension by studying a two dimensional surface “without any reference to a global embedding space.” Riemann, as a student of Gauss, then expanded Guass’ studies to N-dimensional surfaces. I will not get into the exact way in which this was done because it would lead me far beyond the limits of this paper. But if you would like to read more about this transition in geometry see De Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, p. 11-13 or Sklar, Lawrence, Space, Time, and Spacetime . University of California Press, Berkeley, 1977, p. 27-42. 133 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 210.

numbed but remains attuned to the approaching febrile sound of a new rhythm. A good example of these latter cases is learning a second language. When a person begins to learn a second language, she is an egg or larva tapping into a new formation, actually becoming immersed in the movements that are the language. Similar to learning to swim, there is a mixing of two intensities – that of the embryonic tyro and that of the complex sea of the newly encountered language. As new words and grammar sweep over the young pupil, the pupil, in turn, penetrates the cracks of the plane on which the language is situated and that the language constitutes. This does not mean, however, that a state of static equilibrium has been reached, nor that the multiplicity that is the individual has been reduced to a unity; rather, as long as the learning process remains active, always fighting the seductive voice of categorization, and the faculties of language acquisition and apprenticeship remain open to the imperceptible, evolution will continue to happen.

The language affects the individual as much as the individual affects the language, for there is no language outside of the multiplicity of users. Even an traditional language user can find new ways of speaking and seeing, discover new lines of flight, blaze cutting edges of deterritorialization.134

Embryology, the study of the apprentice as larva, sees chance as a mode of being, as a life of affirmation.135 Embryos or larvae are pulsating multiplicities composed of transversals that spread apart with a resounding “yes” exclaimed to the elaboration of the

134 Deleuze’s own example of using language as a line of flight will be elaborated in a later section on Sterne, Lawrence, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy: Gentleman; but for more detailed analysis of expert language use as a means for destratification see Deleuze, “He Stuttered” in Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical p. 107- 114, Deleuze, Gilles. Proust and Signs. Trans. Richard Howard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, and Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. 135 Barnett Newman’s “zips” are like the lines of flight opening up to the outside.

sky, to the possibilities of “sky-chance”136 actualized through the return of the dice. The dice go up and reach an aleatory point, a point of full exposure to the unknown, the presentation of the diagram to the genesis of new worlds. Then, along such an arching curve, when the dice reach that sidereal point at which the return to the strata is inevitable, the composition of a new body is made possible. Since any formation could always have been otherwise, the pushing away from the aleatory point from which novel complexities and formations emerge as always contingent, always historically determined. The virtuality of the outside is filled with infinite movements of thought, which are infinite in that new formations or deformations always diverge.

The first moment is marked by chance, the release of form as identities become imperceptible, “the affirmation of chance”; the second moment is the concrete effectuation of the diagram taking form or becoming actual; that is, the “affirmation of necessity.”137 Necessity, however, does not completely abrogate chance, for necessity is actually affirmed in the same way as multiplicity, intensity and movement are affirmed; necessity, in this sense, is the necessity for becoming, for continual transformation and movement. Effectuation is the actualization of chance encounters, novel combinations and connections of “unformed particles” and “non-subjectified affects.”138 The second moment is not the time of capture, when all freedom and chance are striated on particular strata, but the abecedarian moment when everything is in flux yet attaining a certain degree of moving consistency. This is the plowing of a new earth in a fresh movement, when the old regime is cast aside and a new rhythm begins to resonate along the plane,

136 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 198. 137 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 26. 138 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus p. 262.

when there is a new number on the die. The abecedarian moment is the turn over, the leap in place when the faculties have reached their ends and crossed their thresholds to sense in new ways, to speak in different tongues and with different vocabularies.

The return of the die or the second moment of the diagram is seen in

Rauschenberg’s erasure of De Kooning,139 when abstract expressionism had become sedentary and in need of a new formation; the time of effectuation of the diagram is the changeover from Abstract Expressionism to Neo-Dadaism. Always opposed to tracing, diagramming is the erasure of sedentary structures and modes of existence. When

Rauschenberg erased the tracings of De Kooning, who kept on following the iterated movements of Abstract Expressionism to the very end, even after Pollock had completely destroyed the possibility of representation, form, and figure, and was left alone, tracing and re-tracing the same steps and the same patterns, Rauschenberg experimented with diargammatics. Yet, like making oneself a diagrammatician, even though Rauschenberg sedulously erased for over a month, after maintaining slivers of significance and subjectification, after perfectly mimicking the stratum, he still did not reach the court of chaos of the outside. Perhaps it might have been better to simply fold over the sheet of paper that De Kooning had given to him, creating a limit to the thought of the formations.

For folding pulls the outside onto the inside, yet leaves a blank breadth, “a small plot a new land,”140 a pure nomadic space. The fold, then, is virtual limit, the edge of the page

139 Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). Traces of ink and crayon on paper, with mount and handlettered ink label by Jasper Johns, 64.14x55.25x1.27cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art © Robert Rauschenberg/VAGA, New York and DACS, London 2006. 140 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 161.

of words and the ring of the cone of light; when we will have re-ascended to the mountain crest, or submerged ourselves in the disjunctive river of learning.

The process of folding, which is also the process of actualization or differentiation, the second moment of the dice-throw is the emanation of the movement of the outside through the actualization of forces within historical formations.

“Actualization is never a negation but a creation, and that difference is never negative but essentially positive and creative.”141 Actualization is not the move from a perfect

Platonic heaven toward the world of imperfect copies and negative reliefs because actuality is created by the very process of actualization, actuality is creation. The process of becoming-actual stems from a virtuality that is wholly immanent, internal to each moment and movement. Virtuality and actuality are two sides of the same coin, irreducible to a dichotomy because each moment constitutes the existence of the other, each recipocally determining the other and itself. Creative actualization radiates from

“the explosive internal force that life carries with itself.142 Becoming or thinking, then, by their very nature, is a positive leading forth, the movement of movement, action upon action, production of production, creation. these are the nefarious moments of discontinuity of which Foucault refused to speak and the becoming-imperceptible that

Deleuze could not help but speak. All of a sudden, without any categorical explanation or justification from rigid theories stemming from an image of thought rooted in recognition, given formations drastically change. A new way of relating to individuals or

141 Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomilson and Barbara Habberjam. NY: Zone Books,1988, p. 103. 142 Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 105.

singularities is ushered in. The time of the fear of leprosy is changed into a time of the confinement of the mad.

4. Infinite Egresses

When approaching the diagrammatic outside, or even harnessing diagrammtic features in order to transmogrify the predominant manner of organization, there must be a starting point that captures the movement of forces with a very subtle and delicate mode of presentation. Where to begin, where is this somewhere? Res en media, in the middle of things, like a plateau: “[a] plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end…a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end.”143 This does not mean that all complexities and relations can be reduced down to a pulsating point that ties all forces in an animated knot, this is not a reduction of forms to a paradigm or archetype, for a formation is necessarily miscible.

To begin in the middle and get mixed up in the rhythms of the plurality of flows requires participation, an advocacy of diagrammatic materiality that ripples through the source and the affected assemblage with reciprocal intensity; for “the middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed.”144 Becoming takes the form of a diagrammatic voice, an anonymous voice on a plane of indiscernability, and the encountering assemblage an immanent timbre of becoming-diagrammatic. The subject and the object of the encounter are intertwined in the lines of movements, iacere.

143 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 21-22. 144 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 25.

To begin with a well established formation is merely a starting point that can be picked up, inverted, and colored with a new palate, when doing Foucauldian cartography, or the point of inserting the subversive tendencies of diagrammatic thought, when it is time to dissolve previous formations down to pure relations of movement and infinte becoming. Diagrammatic features and the subject collectively throw the dice at each other, calling at each other in a neutral voice, each becoming the determining and the determined aleatory point for the other in a sea of indeterminability that eventually effectuates itself through folds and pleats.

After the work of cartography, where one begins in the middle and attempts to move to the outside, there is the rise and the fall of the die, moments of abstraction and actualization. Yet up until now the time of abstraction or concretization of new planes of organization has remained quite vague. It is helpful, then, to use Deleuze’s three aspect of sufficient reason in order to move away from the metaphorical use of the Nietzschean imagery and see how the time of actualization actually unfolds. Diagrammatics follows

Deleuze’s conception of the three aspects of sufficient reason: the determinable, the undetermined, and the determined. 145 As we have discovered, creation occurs in the fault line between articulability and visibility, operative in each formation, yet reducible to neither. Thinking or true creativity is the vital force of becoming: multiplicities becoming words or pluralities becoming scenes. Multiplicities are the “focal points or horizons”146 of thought, and have three components: “undetermined with regard to the object, determinable with regard to object of experience, and bearing the ideal of an

145 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 169. 146 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 169.

infinite determination with regard to concepts of the understanding…the differentials of thought.”147 The fractured I, or the subject-assemblage as iacere, swarms amidst such multiplicities, a determinability that gets determined by the indeterminacy of diagrammatics; conversely, diagrammatic features get determined or actualized by the encounter with the movement of the broken subject, iacere. There is a reciprocal determination on all sides by relations of interacting forces, spontaneous and receptive populations of affects. The movements of a diagrammatic actualization, then, are harnessed by the determinability of the encounter, which acts as an open differential relation with ingresses and egresses on all sides. Amidst the revolution of the problem of a yet-to-be-determined determinability is the site or non-site of diagrammatic multiplicities.

Multiplicities are determinable, determined and undetermined in that they do not approach each other with fixed function or collections of matter that are taken to be their essential properties, but come relatively anonymous, asignifying, and incomplete. Iacere as multiplicity does emerge from the strata of light (visibilities) and words

(articulabilities), thereby arriving with a certain collection of processes that can function as the beginning points, but, as we have seen, we always begin in the middle, already always mixed up amongst broken flows and fluctuating relations. The starting point merely marks a mid-way indeterminacy that gets actualized in a number of unforeseeable ways according to the determining affects of the diagrammatic features and the determinability of a yet-to-be-determined temporal and spatial encounter. Diagrammatics

147 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 169.

“mark out the dispersion of the points of choice, and define prior to any option, to any thematic preference, a field of strategic possibilities.”148 Again, the dice is always in a position of undulating between previously being thrown, in the process of throwing, and soon to be or becoming thrown. The lines and zones of the diagrammatic outside stretch out to the insertion of a moving multiplicity. Moreover, the subject as multiplicity, making the subject a poly-ject, poly-iacere, are singularities of assemblages caught in a series of overlapping differential relations that begin somewhere, namely in the middle, move away from the locale, to another middle, and disentangle themselves in another position, yet another middle. Even if the encounter were to carry the contributing multiplicities to their respective ends – with the arrows at the points of the lines of diagrammatic features and the thresholds of the faculties of the subject being the relevant ends – they would still be amidst an oscillating middle. The encounter between two multiplicities, the meeting of subject as a pure act of throwing, iacere, and the diagrammatic outside, is a problem that circles back on itself only to lead somewhere else, a moving infrastructure of progressive determination. This is the double corroboration or double incarnation of bodies through transformative relations and encounters. The differential elements, populations of multiplicities, are “objectively made and unmade according to the conditions which determine their fluent synthesis.”149

Since diagrammatic features are always in a position of determinable, undetermined, and determined, they remain vectorial, essentially twisting into a bleeding confrontation that determines the relational multiplicities. Diagrammatics points or,

148 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 37. 149 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 187.

perhaps better, throws toward what comes after, the next moment, toward the adjunct neighborhood, the movement of a line made only of intensity and direction; it is the nascent stage of redrawing, a dice-throw that is always in between the last result and the next, a non-place of fracture and erasure, a shift from middle to middle, immanence that always lead to more immanence.

Although I have been meshing together many ideas from throughout Deleuze and

Guattari’s books, their own theory of diagrammatics appears most explicitly in A

Thousand Plateaus. According to the fifth plateau of those thousand plateaus, the diagram is a dynamic outline utilized in the event of the creation of concepts. Put differently, as Deleuze has also lain out in his book on Foucault, a diagram is an abstraction from a discursive or semiotic theory, made only of pure function and pure matter. A diagram abstracts or deterritorializes the contents and expressions sensed in any philosophical project, leaving only the mobile relations, endless processes, intensive differences, “degrees of intensity, resistance, conductivity, heating, stretching, speed or tardiness”150 exposed in pure relief; once content and expression or substance and form are left behind, only traits remains. The actualization of the prison form or the layout of the asylum are purified through selection and abstraction, raised to the greatest degree, and carried off to the nth power.151 This abstraction, then, is neither symbolic nor iconic, which are simply semiotic processes that attempt to grab land and territorialize it with spirit duplicators and ditto machines,152 but a presentation of the in-between: the rupture

150 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 141. 151 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 142. 152Spirit duplicators or ditto machines were very popular means of cheaply making large number of copies in a relatively short amount of time, which, due to the speed of deterritorialization of the reign of Xerox and digital tracing

between a beautifully colored cartography and pure conceptual movement, the concrete yet mobile conditions of actuality that remain and function as yet-to-be actualized, and abstract collections of traits slipping into and out of words and things, transversing historical formations. Full representation of the actuality is no-where to be found. Rather, there is only a now-here of colors and sensations, both conceptually active yet physically present as a combination of an “operative set of traits and color patches, of lines and zones.”153 Diagrammatic features are fragments of immanence that not only convey proper names, which all diagrams have,154 about the prison or disciplinary society, for example, but what they do, how they are practiced, the style and results of actualization.

A diagram is a “germ of order or rhythm” indicating the “possibilities of all types of fact being planted.”155 It is not merely optical, not just a visual perception as defined by the patch of color hitting the eye and the eye alone, but manual, tactile, haptic,156 the sensible confrontation experienced at the threshold of a new world as it appears in the determining effects of a new encounter. Diagrammatics marks the intrusion of the outside, yet it is also important to remember that the outside is wholly immanent, piloting the evolution of actuality. The threshold of diagrammatics is the turning point of utilization, where the panopticon, for example, gets utilized first in the architectonics of

in the 1980’s and 1990’s, has fallen almost completely out of use. There are still some, though, who recall the alluring aroma of the ink being pressed on fresh wax that was both seductive and toxic. 153 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, p. 83. 154 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 142. Their conception of proper names should not be confused with rigid designation or any attempts to establish a fixed, unchanging identity; but is more akin to the naming of hurricanes or military operation: Hurricane Mitch, Hurricane Katrina, Joy Division (the name for the prostitution wing in Nazi Concentration camps in Karol Cetinsky’s World War II novel The House of Dolls; the camps were mainly used to reward cooperative non-Jewish inmates), Operation Iraqi Liberation (the tentative name for the latest invasion of Iraq the was scrapped because the acronym spells O.I.L.), etc. 155 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, pp. 103, 160 n. 3. 156 Haptics is a branch of psychology that investigates sense data relating to or affecting the skin. Deleuze utilizes this notion in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation.

nineteenth century prisons, schools, the barracks, and hospitals; then, in contemporary society, as it loses the tie to the stones and wood of thick walls and heavy gates and functions and localizes at the reflection of each mirroring surface, casting gazes in all directions, both panoptically and synoptically. This evolution of the diagram is indeed a

“ ‘catastrophe,’ and the chance that this abyss will give way to rhythm… that this gray point will ‘leap over itself’ and unlock dimensions of sensation.”157 Potentiality for novel sensation is unlocked by the intrusion of subtending forces. The actualization of diagrammatic features is a joyous leap that sends a rippling oscillation along different strata: panopticism appears in the educational prison, the penal system, the military, the hospital, and now, today, extends as one side of a living diagrammatic structuration that captures the body in a movement of forces, gazes, words, reflection, relations, countenances, etc. The tension of the rising and falling of the diagrammatic dice are deterritorialized or released and then actualized, reterritorialized, in heterogeneous formations.

Moreover, diagrammatics is constructive and inclusively disjunctive.

Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways [in that it] is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation.158

Given that diagrammatics is a rhizomatic activity, there is never a return to the same, never a reduction of chance to statistical probability. It is not a matter of what one says about it but what one does with it, what mode of existence it implies, what style of life it

157 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, p. 83-84 158 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 12.

entails, how it is practiced, how it is produced, how it is performed. In terms of the prison, the repetition of redundant identities and sanctioned significances perpetuates penal tracings, enveloping the intensive processes that give rise to such major composites as the guard and the prisoner, while the diagrammatic potentiality is always immanently subtending slightly below recognition.

Again, it is important to maintain that diagrammatics is about immanence, performance, practice. The ready-made truths and stabilities, the previously determined propensities and predispositions, and the “tracing[s] should be put back on the map.”159

The tracing does not merely resemble, reproduce, or reduplicate the map or diagram, for diagrammatics operates through selection, subtraction, modulation, and isolation. The lives of diagrammatic assemblages consist of transversals and vectors, sinuous intensities arching in multiple directions and discordant becomings. Diagrammatics is the breath of thought, the exposure of the dissidence of thought between words and scenes, selecting functions and matter at different intervals and in different combinations. Predominant formations, subjectifications, and significations or tracings are starting points that can be plugged “back into the map, connect[ing] the roots or trees back up with a rhizome.”160

Tracings are made to leak and trail off in all directions.161 Thereby, diagrammatics can open up lines of flight from the striated grid and static structure of dominant formations.

A line of flight appears “in the somber opacity of the combinatory ensemble, it is like a

159 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 13. 160 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 14. 161 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 301.

window”162 to the outside that can be realized at every point on the tracing. Below the structure of the signifier, in the shadow of red-hot commodities, beneath the faciality of

Identity and the State are multiple underground burrows, entryways, and exits, as exemplified in William S. Burroughs’ hiatus from the outer strata.163 For it is necessary to get a “foothold in formations,”164 it is important to understand and

see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only there that the BwO165 reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities.166

Constructing rhizomatic escapes or lines of flight enables “one to blow apart the strata, cut roots, and make new connections,”167 becoming different people along the way, toting different masks at each corner, a transversal masquerade, experiencing life as an experiment,168 for each moment of subjectifications, where one attempts to found oneself in a static conception of the subject reveals that the “ego is a mask for other masks, a

162 Badiou, Alain. Deleuze: The Clamour of Being. Trans. Louis Burchill. Minneapolis: Universitity of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 37. 163 During periods of the 1970’s Burroughs would retreat to an old YMCA gymnasium that he had converted into a secluded apartment. Living in such conditions provided him with a way of constructing a mode of existence that was otherwise proscribed by late twentieth-century American socio-politico-juridical practices. Burroughs engaged in drug usage, alternative sexual activity, experimental writing and music, and attempted to generate blocks of pure sensation that explored new possibilities for life. Burroughs would then re-enter the standard striated world and insert uncomfortable combinations of words and things that destabilized common mores and conduct. In the bunker Burroughs “draws a circle, or better ye walks in a circle as in a children’s dance, combining rhythmic vowels and consonants that correspond to the interior forces of creation as to the different parts of and organism.” Then, upon re- inserting himself in the world, he “ventures from home on the thread of a tune,” a tune that he has constructed out of the available materials. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus p. 311. 164 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 14. 165 A BwO, or body-without-organs, is a difficult concept that cannot be dealt with given the constraints of this work. It is enough, however, to equate, at least in this instance, a BwO with the imperceptible plane of the diagram subtending in the outside. For more on a BwO see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. London: The Athalone Press, 1984 . 166 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 161. 167 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 15. 168 Etymologically, ‘experiment’ and ‘experience’ both stem from the present participle of the Latin verb experiri, which means to try or to test. Deleuze and Guattari play off this subtle distinction, always showing how the experience of life is, at the heart of it, an experiment, a trial.

disguise under other disguises.”169 In order stave off rigid philosophies rooted in subjectivity or recognition one must remain supple and open to the outside, exposed to creative movements and transmogrifications, yet always informed of the workings of forces of stratification and apparatuses of capture. Thus the dualities implode when tracings are plugged into maps, when the taproot is cut and attached to strange new uses.

Diagrammatics deterritorializes by “penetrating the trunk”170 and rupturing the striae of organization in the encounter with “variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots”171 that reach the threshold of death, where death is understood as the contingent point of bifurcation, at the point of extreme intensity, where one assemblage transforms so dramatically so as to appear and act in a such a way that there can no longer be any line drawn from the root to the rhizome other than the line of becoming. The decalcomaniacal tracer cannot help but find herself in a process of becoming-other, for she “unknowingly enters into a becoming that conjugates with the unknowing becoming of that which he or she imitates.”172 Death is understood as the point of bifurcation, when predominant patterns of behavior stop revolving around a certain attractive point and begin to oscillate at different frequencies, following different lines of organization, creating new modes of existence. Death, the aleatory point of the dice-throw, is the end of one style of organization and the beginning of the next.

Life, diagrammatically conceived, cannot be limned so as to conjure up merely organic connotations that provide only life of the human kind; for a diagrammatic

169 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 110. 170 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 15. 171 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 21. 172 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 305.

examination of life reveals that living things are nothing more than movement, differences, and repetition. Life is the production of expressivity; the mountain and the bird are equally alive, the bird-becoming-mountain and the mountain-becoming-bird, each expressing the intensive processes that produced the greater composite that is apparent today. The mountain is not a sum of passive material, but actually contributes to and affects the flow of iron, lava, sand; it is a living meshwork of flows of material sedimenting and then breaking down at different intervals. The different geological compounds express themselves as constitutive of and constituted by the immanent processes through the bands of colors and forms of organization seen on mountainsides.

Similarly, the bird is not a particular member of a static genus, but an assemblage of living molecules that emit blocks of sensations (bird songs) and intimately take part in a living flux of immanent morphogenetic processes and flows. Life, then, is not a certain class of particular atoms, not a transcendent judgment and attribution of membership to an over-arching table of classification, but is practiced, having more to do with vitality and the tenor of existence than membership of a certain “living” category. To be alive is to be part of the complex movement of the production of material forms and genetic processes. As Dan Smith puts it in his beautiful introduction to a collection of Deleuze’s essays on literature,

[l]ife does not function in Deleuze’s philosophy as transcendent principles of judgment but as an immanent process of production or creation: it is neither an origin nor a goal, neither an arche nor a telos, but a pure process that always operates in the middle au milieu, and proceeds by means of experimentations and unforeseen becomings.173

173 Smith, Daniel, Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical, p. Iii.

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In this way, the strictly human domain that Foucault analyzed is extended and intermeshed with birdsongs and the mass of geological strata. Life is the production of immanent differences erupting in between apparatuses of capture, not the reduction to a common identity.

Diagrammatics, then,

begins with the outside of its own gap; its locus is the gap between …[because] it deprives us of our continuities; it dissipates that temporal identity in which we are pleased to look at ourselves when we wish to exorcise the discontinuities of history…and where anthropological thought once questioned man’s being or subjectivity, it now bursts open to the other, and the outside. In this sense, the diagnosis does not establish the fact of our identity by the play of distinctions. It establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks. This difference, far from being the forgotten and recovered origin, is this dispersion that we are and make.174

Only differences repeat, while the recognizable same always passes away. “Above all, diagrammatics should not be confused with an operation of the axiomatic type.”175 When functioning smoothly, diagrammatic features are moving potentialities that are effective as long as they keep moving, always becoming-different. To codify into a base system of self-evidences and axioms would be to shut diagrammatic forces down, to close off the senses leaving only cerebral redundancies implied by the salient strata; it would leave man to himself locked up in his constantly surveyed cell grasping for his subjectivity, madly shouting his identity, repeating the same structure over and over again. Rather, diagrammatics are necessarily active, a living, breathing, pulsating diaspora of nomadic signs, settling along one stratum for a bit, but only to de-stratify and slide along the

174 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge p. 131. 175 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus p. 143.

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mountain crest of becoming as shapes mutate, as functions disorganize themselves before reaching a deeper level of the strata.

Although axioms may be used for the establishment of order, they are reductive, cutting off rhizomatic shoots at every chance. Axioms reduce and delimit life by constantly referring to empty forms by utilizing a triple-attack of binarization, serialization, and linearization that “shatter[s] the continuums of intensity, introducing breaks between different strata and within each stratum. They prevent conjunctions of flight from forming and crush the cutting edges of deterritorialization, either by effecting reterritorializations that make these movements merely relative, or by assigning certain of the lines an entirely negative value.”176

The pure potentialities of the diagram harden when the strata installs a dominant regime of signs or axioms or structure of subjectifications, while identities colonize bodies and objects that fall within the cone of light and those that do not. Axiomatics trims weeds, only allowing binary growth from the taproot up, cutting and removing the debris of underground moving catacombs and multiple exits and entryways. For arboreal, binary, serialized, and linear logic, the only path available for travel unravels along two-way highways from the trunk to the branches, from the suburbs to the state capital, which houses the golden tablets displaying the axiomatic self-evidences.

Diagrammatics, in contrast to axiomatic arborealism, must tap into the living flow of thought, the rapid pulse of becoming something different, of becoming-other, devenir-

176 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus p. 143.

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autre. Diagrammatics, as writing, reading, thinking, “is worthwhile in so far as we don’t know what we will be in the end,”177 paradoxically opening up its own infinite alteration.

5. Making Oneself a Diagrammatician

Now that we have seen the inner workings of the third moment, it might be helpful to look as some examples of this diagrammatic process. There are innumerable ways of making oneself a diagrammatician. For one, it is possible to select by means of mathematical analysis, utilizing geometric maps and lines.178 Or it is possible to follow digressive negotiations along the becoming of one’s life through voluntary and involuntary memory, each kind of memory feeding the other, as Proust does in The

Remembrance of Thing Past179 or as Lawrence Sterne does in Tristram Shandy.

Sterne, himself, not only utilizes literal diagrams as he creates a digressive becoming of his entire life, hoping, ostensively, to cover all the grounds, encounters, feelings, and happenings of his life, he also constructs lines that cut through typical stratified styles of autobiography by drawing micro lines that carve through dominant formations like “a knife through everything”180 leading into a pure zone of indiscernibility. Tristram Shandy finds himself lost in the whirlwind of possible movements, possible entryways and exits into and out of the path of his life. For a

Deleuzian reading of Sterne, an autobiography is “an intensive compound that vibrates

177 Foucault, Michel. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, Eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman. 178 For example, Leibniz and the creation of the calculus, Gauss and the implantation of coordinate axes on the surface of the very surface of a geometrical plane, Riemann’s topological extension of Gauss’ break with Cartesian geometry, and many others. 179 I will not go into the writings of Marcel Proust because Deleuze himself does a much better job of handling such wonderful books in Proust and Signs. 180 Deleuze, and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus, p. 263.

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and expands, that has no meaning, but makes us whirl about until we harness the maximum of possible forces in every direction, each of which receives a new meaning by entering into relation with the others.”181 In his attempt to capture the whole of his life, every minute detail, forgetting no minor character, Tristram Shandy begins to stutter.

Shandy dissolves himself in the swarm of intensive processes; even in the attempt to relive all of his story, to relatively deterritorialize, he finds that he can only mumble almost inaudibly since he has been swept up by the momentum of all the available lines of flight opened up in such a diagrammatic endeavor, where the meaning comes across only through a complex block of affects “that brings together within itself the quiver, the murmur, the stutter, the tremolo, or the vibrato, and makes the indicated affect reverberate through words.”182

Shandy tried to diagrammatically abstract from the rigid formations of his life in order to recast the events in a poetic order, but he failed, and in this failure Shandy found himself successfully becoming-different in a zone of discontinuous variation; he finds that he is “a foreigner in the language in which he expresses himself.”183 Each time

Shandy senses that he is closing in on the end, he reaches a threshold, a point of bifurcation, and dies, but only to begin again, in a new place, in a new time, in a new milieu, with a new set of possibilities. The impossibility of diagramming all of Shandy’s life is actually, at one and the same time, the appearance of a foothold in the strata, that is, in the standard, arboreal styles of writing. Sterne’s writings, as seen in this Deleuzian reading of Tristram Shandy, are transmogrification of rigid lines into supple vectors, the

181 Deleuze, “To have Done with Judgment” in Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 134. 182 Deleuze, “He Stuttered” in Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 108. 183 Deleuze, “He Stuttered” in Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 109.

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creation of lines of flight exiting common modes of existence despite the strangling hold of the strata. “We have to see creation as [diagramming]184 a path between two impossibilities…A creator who isn’t grabbed around the throat by a set of impossibilities is no creator. A creator’s someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities…Without a set of impossibilities you won’t have a line of flight, the exit that is creation, the power of falsity that is truth.”185 This is why we must begin with the strata, the tracing, the dominant formation.

Perhaps the greatest success of Shandy’s diagrammatic endeavor, then, is his very inability to map the whole of his life’s territories and the relative deterritorialization and reterritorialization of his autobiography. He always falls far short of totalization since, as life continues, Sterne, yet again and again, becomes something more. In his sinuous narration, Shandy finds that his language is always shooting out ahead of him, “it is as if language were stretched along an abstract and infinitely varied line.”186 Throughout his magnum opus, Sterne diagrammatically provides lines, textures, and contours that allow him to exclaim, at the end of each of the lines, “what a journey;”187 and in this journey

Sterne “make[s] language take flight, [he] send[s] it racing along a witch’s line, ceaselessly placing it in a state of disequilibrium, making it bifurcate and vary in each of its terms, following an incessant modulation.”188 Tristram Shandy is “a tool for life lines, in other words, all these real becomings that are not produced only in art, and all those

184 In the original quote, Deleuze had writing the word ‘tracing,’ but this misuse of his own terms is easily remedied by the insertion of ‘diagramming’ in its place. 185 Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations. Trans. Martin Joughlin. NY: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 133. 186 Deleuze, “He Stuttered” in Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 109. 187 Sterne, Lawrence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Ed. Graham Petrie. London: Folio Society, 1970, p. 379. 188 Deleuze, “He Stuttered” in Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 109.

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active escapes that do not consist in fleeing into art…but instead sweep it away with them toward the realms of the asignifying, the asubjective, and faceless.”189

It may be contended that Sterne ultimately fails in his ponderous endeavor, failing to apprehend the truth of his entire life story, but this failure is his greatest success. His failures indicate the constant creation of a diagrammatic outside, as does Russell and

Whitehead’s failure to reduce mathematics to logic in their Principia Mathematica, as does Spinoza’s failure to take a complete taxonomy of emotions in his Ethics, as does

Godel’s demonstration that all attempts at complete mathematization of a system are ultimately incomplete. The supposed failure of mathematical reduction or discursive distillations always leaves open a line to the outside. The dynamism of diagrammatics prevents full apropriation and complete assimilation into closed deparments.

Diagramamtics must call together in one and the same voice mathematics, philosophy, art, history, linguistics, etc. The egresses to the subtending continuum of variations external to totalized systems is actually a succesful becoming.

This does not mean, however, that there is only “movement ‘in general’ in diagrammatic features, but always a movment of sorts.”190 The diagram must harness

“two complementary movements”191: a line of flight leading out of the strata and another line of concretization that takes the form of a new mode of organization. Symbolization, mathematization, subjectification, penalization, signification must tap into the unformed functions and matter of diagrammatics in order to produce self-evidences, symbols, mathematical constants, subjects, prisons, and significance. These planes face out to the

189 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 187. 190 Mullarkey, John. Post-Continental Philosophy. NY: Continuum, 2006, p. 180. 191 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 144.

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outside and its immanent becoming, although in a “relativized and negatived”murmur.192

Converesely, since the consistency of stratification requires diagrammtic input, there are always diagramamtic movements that break from pre-established paths and produce

“lines [that] leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of ants.”193 Each assemblage, then, has two polar faces, one honing in on the strata, and the other gazing out along the backs of moving ants crawling toward the outside like Escher’s ants crawling along the infinite contour of the Möbious strip, simultaneously facing the strata and the outside, univocally descending and ascending: pure diagramamtic conjugation.

Diagramatics, then, is somewhat akin to Escher’s depictions of absurdities, of the articulation of nonsensicalities and paradoxes that can, at the same time, be create a new plot of land. Diagrammatics allows seeming nonsense into actuality. By drawing out a diagram of impossible sequences and series of variables and ideas, our sedentary modes of existence are drastically altered, abruptly shut down. Paradoxes should not be feared but heralded as new points of experience, new possiblities for creation, new opportunities to confront and connnect.

This Deleuzian reading of Sternes Tristram Shandy is the perfect place to finish the first three moments of diagrammatics. Diagrammaticians always begin on the strata, tracing the formations and lines of organization, experimenting with the opportunities that are offered, locating advantageous footholds, experimenting with potential egresses and ingresses, producing blocks of sensation here and there. This is as very disciplined process that is always dangerous, for it is always possible to fall back into the

192 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 144. 193 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 22.

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comfortable redundancies of predominant formations and ways of life. Sometimes it is necessary to take Nietzsche’s advice and philosophize with a hammer, yet, given the successful reputation of modern apparatuses of capture, it is often better to do it with a file, to meticulously grind down the sharp edges and complex locks of that strata that cut off the possibility of flight into adjacent rooms. By plugging into the strata and the tracing, a diagrammatician is able to find a place, to round up alliances, to gradually give up the strata, “to construct flow by flow, segment by segment lines of experimentation,”194 to temporarily abandon oneself and one’s identity to the lines of flight leading into the imperceptibility of the outside. A diagram is not exterior to the strata but immanently outside of it, “it is adjacent to it and is continually in the process of constructing itself.”195 To follow the lines of flight beginning in the strata, in a milieu, transforming into a map through a Foucauldian splintering of historical accounts, always providing new entranceways and exits into and out of the traditional histories, and then reaching the imperceptible, virtual register of the diagrammatic outside along the arching path of the Nietzschean dice-throw, one finds oneself in a “field of intensities or a wave of vibrations, a continuous variation, like a terrible threat welling up inside us.”196 The song of the prisoner humming to himself within the prison formation is a potential index for becoming-other, for traveling from one assemblage, the penal assemblage, to the next assemblage, a block of sensations overwhelming the prisoner and providing a line of deterritorialization, as if the prisoner were to burst through the roof.197 The becoming-

194 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 161. 195 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 162. 196 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 305. 197 Kafka, Franz. The Castle. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. NY: Knopf, 1976.

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other of the prisoner leads into a zone of indiscernibility, where the distinction between the guard and the prisoner ceases to be relevant. In such a process, it is no longer possible to compare static identities, but only to “calculate and compare powers,”198 intensities, forces, speeds, emerging from the strata and disrupting the given formation.

Instead of saying, “my mother,” “his father,” there are only degrees: degrees “and relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacitates to affect and to be affected,”199 in short, intensities.

Now that we have seen how the first three moments of diagrammatics are unveiled, it is time to set things in motion, to locate a mobile plane of actualities. The first three moments – the generative moment of tracing and locating footholds, the cartographic transformational moment seen through Foucault’s historical studies of prisons and madness, and the diagrammatic moment of becoming-imperceptible – are now over, and it is time to program the findings. The final moment, discussed in the final chapter, will take off along the falling arc of the second half of the dice-throw, where abstract traits and lines concretize in moving formations. It is helpful to recall the beginning of one of Foucault’s most important works, The Order of Things, because it is from the very first phrase of the introduction to the book that we will begin.

198 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 307. 199 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus p. 261.

The Compound Gallery of Desire

Picasso Las Meninas, August 17, 1957

The painter is still standing back from the canvas, but it is no longer possible to tell where he is glancing. He may be looking straight at us, the viewers, yet while it appears as if the right eye is hovering “motionless,” “suspended” in an indirect field of

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gazes, the other eye has turned on itself, upon the face, trying, though always and already unsuccessfully, to gaze upon itself, to see what might be seen in the varying position of the hidden figure situated beyond our sight on the front of the secreted canvas. He is caught up in his desire to see the front of his body, obviating his own desire: he cannot see what others see. What do we see, the exterior field of gazes, but a reticulate assemblage of partial objects200 haphazardly thrown together, easily manipulable, bumping up against other partial objects, overlapping perspectives, which then break apart leaving a residual ring of spittle. Long, thin strands of saliva still cling to a chunk of the artist’s hair, dangling down one side of his face. The saliva is the pictorial evidence of the force of becoming, the flow of desire that pulses through every figure in the painting, constituting the relationships that we see.

Where is his hand? Where is his brush? Which is holding which? Down below the painter’s waist a brush floats just disconnected from the hand, breaking off the flow of creativity, the movement of the brush, the flow momentarily broken off from the canvas, about to depict another monarchical Spanish scene. The painting is over, but only for a moment, for new productions are about to be created, as the backup of the flow of desire begins to seep out. From the tip of the brush a white trail is visible, the obvious trace emanating from the brush holding the hand. The hand is not skilled, the brush is, and the brush is the temporary source of desire. Our gaze obeys the direction of the brush, yet the brush follows the direction of the gaze: a double corroboration. At each moment in the painting there is the possibility of bifurcation, of recognizing one’s complicity in the

200 See Melanie Klein for a full description of partial body objects.

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repetition of the grid of gazes. And it is this moment, the reoccurring possibility for the destabilization of the structuration of viewing a repeated image that must be explored.

Although the scene seems to be static and enclosed, it is actually the potentiality for the creation of a new field, the potentiality for disrupting the feedback loop, the opportunity to obviate the meticulous surveillance and documentation of life. By working with the abstract schema of the painting as a diagrammatic model for mapping a new geography, it will become possible to break free of the strategies of power guiding and governing the body in contemporary society.

What can the brush “volume up”?201 What can it produce? The scene to be produced, the production to be “volumed up”, is unforeseeable. Although the ‘scene’ has always been an ambiguous and at times problematic notion in Foucault, it functions quite nicely in this new description of Picasso’s variations.202 Every available combination, every angle of connection is possible through the continuous integration of forces into different formations and shapes. The painter “has no doubt just appeared,”203 and we can see the results of his breaking away from the act of painting, the cutting off of the flow of creation. He is cut open, breasts outturned, double opposite arrows pointing up and down, a rise and a fall, expanding and decreasing. New affects erupt on the surface of the painting again and again; new thresholds are produced; the canvas appears double. There is the vision of the canvas that the artist is painting, lying slightly beyond the canvas that we see from our position; this, the canvas of the painter’s gaze, is caught somewhere in between the eye peering out at us and the vision of the scene about to be placed on the

201 Foucault, The Order of Things. p. 3. 202 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 80. 203 Foucault The Order of Things, p. 3

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actual canvas whose back we can barely see. Look where he is looking, he is looking at us, or we are looking at him, or both? “The observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange.”204 We see his body and he seems to see ours. What does he see?

We will never know, for it remains forever concealed between his gaze, his vision, and the canvas.

From the eyes of the painter to what he is observing there runs a compelling line that we, the onlookers, have no power of evading: it runs through the real picture and emerges from its surface to join the place from which we see the painter observing us; this dotted line reaches out to us ineluctably, and links us to the representation of the picture…In appearance, this locus is a simple one; a matter of pure reciprocity: we are looking at a picture in which the painter is in turn looking out at us. A mere confrontation, eyes catching one another’s glance, direct looks superimposing themselves upon one another. 205

We, the onlookers, appear to be caught by the gaze of the painter, but we are not.

We are free to move on, to observe another painting in the gallery. Yet while we remain here, fixated on these unusual pictures, we notice a penetrating exchange, an exchange of gazes with no foreseeable end and an unimaginable beginning. How many sets of eyes do we see, are we seen by? Let’s count: there are the two faces of the artists, the indifferent glances of the princess, the smug and distorted glow of the dwarf, the young maids of honour primping and appeasing the sumptuous princess. Looking to the right we see two doubles: a pair of twins wearing a pair of white boots and displaying two pairs of hands.206 They may be sharing in the secret of the scene, a judgment about the

204 Ibid., p. 5 205 Ibid., p. 4 205 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 3. 205 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 80. 205 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 3 205 Ibid., p. 5 205 Ibid., p. 4 206 Foucault refers to this pair of individuals as the king’s courtiers, one male and one female.

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addition of each new spectator. There are more, innumerably more; an endless number of people can view the painting, and thus become part of the schema. Directing our eyes toward the back of the room and into the mirror, we see something we do not expect. “Is that my face?” one may say, “Is that what I look like?” There is no way of knowing. As the painter tries and always fails to examine himself, to gaze upon his own gaze, we repeat the endeavor. The reflection is not mine, the reflection is not yours, the reflection is just another gaze, another pair of eyes falling back on us again, catching us before this opaque scene.

There seems to be three figures left. Three figures, two probably human and one canine, but they have no eyes that we can see. They have hidden their gazes behind purely colored figures. Amidst this oscillation of forms, this vast, unstable scene, their eyes could yet appear; they could have been watching us the whole time. We cannot know whether a furrowed gaze is piercing us, we cannot tell when we are being surveyed, and that is the genius of the landscape. These figures are panoptic: seeing without being seen, yet we must always act as if we were permanently being watched, as if we were in an inescapable stream of surveillance. They have cleverly positioned themselves as ironic and enchanted silhouettes, both too bright and too dark to make out.

The two completely white figures at the bottom right of the picture are the cubist transformations of a child and a dog, Velasquez’s own pet dachshund that he has surreptitiously inserted. They are both unaware, both pure innocent fields of possibilities.

The young boy long since deprived of his little red dress, now stands unsuspecting, an empty figure, a hollow machine hooking up to a canine machine; and what perfect flow

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they have. Continuous, anonymous formations that are literally bodies without organs.

Two smooth spaces that can easily be manipulated, swept away, illuminated by the bright stage light of the burst of the sun breaking through the Spanish sky. In fact, it is as if these nascent figures were small theatres themselves, the bounds of their own cells, permanently and objectively visible.

By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower [now a metaphor for any position], standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows [limning the white figures] in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individuated and constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities [transient assemblages] that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately…Full lighting and the eye of the supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.207

The flow of light washing into the room renders all bodies visible; sterilizing the space filled with figures, now empty, now filled. It ties the bodies together, evincing a common flow, enveloping the scene, expanding the possible sites for the implementations of a desirable body type. The blank bodies have been produced and can now be recorded and measured against a monetary standard, evaluated in terms of the dominant system of commodification. They are no longer identified as a young boy and an innocent dog but two living surfaces of smooth, delicate tissue.

[The] subject is not the center, which is occupied by the machine, but on the periphery, with no fixed identity, forever decentered, defined by the states through which it passes…starting from zero, a series in the series of states in the celibate [body] machine; and the subject is born of each new state in the series, is continually reborn of the following state that determines him [or her] at a given moment, consuming- consummating all these states that cause him [her] to be born and reborn (the lived state coming first, in relation to the subject that lives it)”.208

The white bodies, emblematic of the body of the modern woman, are perfected, rendered null by the operations of the whole scene, the “mobile army of gazes” unconcerned with

207 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 200. 208 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 20.

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truth. Yet what is interesting about the panoptic field of vision filled with the willing empty cavities – pure, smooth figures asking to be filled – is the possibility of anonymous yet immanent operation. It is possible for anyone, at any position on the surface to operate and contribute to the power of the gaze: the design is “polyvalent in its applications.”209 Such an architectonic ordering implements a fully decoded yet highly efficient form of control. The bodies are governed by the figure itself, but the figure is only an effect of a localized population of gazes. Everyone in the scene, from the queen and the artist to the whispering Siamese twins and the infinite cast of viewers stepping before and moving away from the paintings, has a stake in the matter. We all contribute to the shape of this grid of gazes.

The constant yet mobile surveillance established and reinforced by contemporary technological networks is one and the same as the potentiality for perpetuation of this society of control and the opportunity for the introduction of feedback interruptions. By using some Foucauldian methodological structures, most notably his interpretation of

Panopticism, it becomes possible to diagram a new conceptual apparatus. Modes of data accumulation and the codification of desires can be utilized to subvert this compound gallery of desire and suspend our contribution to this grid of gazes. The desire to adorn oneself with a perfect body, to corporeally conform to the heralded body type simultaneously produces the introduction of subversion and chaos, leading to the breakdown of surveillance and control. The question is what the abstract methodology for breaking away from the reinforced habituation that is implicit in contemporary social

209 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 205.

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structuration. With every habit, with every routine, with every corroboration of the social machine, one can create new habits, one can create new routines, one can think differently and become other than the desired body type. A new diagram that conjoins the operative structure of surveillance can decode the valuations of desired commodities, diagnose the economy of control, and program a mode of becoming that breaks our complicity in the social machine and produces unfamiliar, unforeseen, and transgressive behaviors that blaze lines of escape from the predominant system.

This pictorial Panopticon presents half of the picture, an important and still operative half, but wanting. It is necessary to present the Panopticon as this half of the picture, but only so as to pave the way for the completion of contemporary social structuration and order with further diagramming. A body is not only a prisoner of social practices of desire and consumption, but also a complicit element in a whole economy of power relations. I begin with the traditional geography.

The Panopticon, freed from its architectural limitations, is a liberatory, or, more accurately, continuous conjunction of sterile laboratories that experiment and transfigure the stock of objects. This punitive, meticulous machine, personalized by docile, normalized figures, locates and distributes bodies in relation to other bodies according to the set of relations constituting this compound gallery of desire. The infinite, anonymous gazes function as the striae of the grid highlighting a fleeting foci of desirable body types, and opens up channels for the redistribution of desire. Picasso’s variations comprise an organic interpretation of an adaptive technology that has been deterritorialized from the

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blueprint of the panoptic prison and reterritorialized at localized surfaces. Anything can be produced; any body can become any other. With the mere succor of the cosmetic knife, the sterile tube sucking out chunks of fat, the pale laxative, the dieting pill, the gym, the finger placed ever so slightly in the back of the throat, or the bloated catharsis of bulimia, the body is emptied of its substance and filled with assemblages of partial objects, all easily manipulable. These are characterized by the white fungible figures entering at the bottom right.

What Foucault says about Velasquez’s original can also be applied to Picasso’s variations. Further back, in the far right side of the room:

[a] man stands out in full-length silhouette; he is seen in profile; with one hand he is holding back the weight of a curtain; his feet are placed on different steps; one knee is bent. He may be about to enter the room; or he may be merely observing what is going on inside it, content to surprise those within without being seen himself. Like the mirror, his eyes are directed towards the other side of the scene; nor is anyone paying any more attention to him than to the mirror. We do not know where he has come from: it could be that by following uncertain corridors he has just made his way around the outside of the room in which these characters are collected and the painter is at work…One foot only on the lower step, his body entirely in profile, the ambiguous visitor is coming in and going out at the same time, like a pendulum caught at the bottom of its swing. He repeats on the spot, but in the dark reality of his body, the instantaneous movement of those images flashing across the room, plunging into the mirror, being reflected there, and springing out from it again like a visible, new, and identical species. Pale, miniscule, those silhouetted figures in the mirror [or anywhere in the scene] are challenged by the tall, solid stature of the man appearing in the doorway.210

This reversed silhouette, caped in most of the variations, symbolizes the anonymous tower erected and looming over the circular walls of this scrupulous machine. All that the inmates can see is the thin outline, the dark silhouette of a surveillance tower, depersonalized and generalized.

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange

210 Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 10-11.

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things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.211

The figures in the painting, and the bodies of women in turn, are enabled, empowered, given the means to survey themselves. In all the reflective surfaces – shop windows, hand mirrors, puddles of rainwater, identification with a celebrity or idealized figures – women find the reminder of an all-seeing eye. The body never escapes the gaze, the theatre of desire. The law is internalized; the gaze is internalized; the body is reversed.

Once a type of body is held up for display, the woman is able “to exploit the bad instincts of all sufferers for the purpose of self-discipline, self-surveillance.”212

The inspector’s voice also enters the cells through “conversation tubes” – innocent ways of reaching directly into the individual’s private intimate dwelling space – that transmit orders, imperatives, advice, ways of achieving the aims of that advice, options opened up for the fulfillment of orders. An unknown voice is able to communicate without being attached to a face, to a clearly defined source of authority.

The prisoners, that is, the women, responding to the advice or imperative cannot know for sure whether they are being surveyed, but the call has been heeded, the order has been felt, and the more personalized and the more individually directed the order is, the more autonomous the women may feel. She seems perfectly able to deny the call, to ignore the advice; yet this sense of freedom, this state of liberty to choose one way or the other, is not actually freedom at all. The woman may be under close tabs or she may not, but, due

211 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 201. 212 Nietzsche, Freidrich. Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale. NY: Vintage Books, 1967, sec. III paragraph 16.

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to the anonymous yet personalized and poignant character of the gaze and the voice, she is susceptible to discontinuous yet inevitable punishment. In order to prevent the possibility of feeling the repercussions of an inspector recently ignored, she must always act as if she were to be reprimanded, as if she were constantly surveyed, as if punishment were a necessary effect of a denial of the call to have this or that type of body.

There was, however, a plan to be followed so that transgressions are not only discouraged but also eradicated out right. Here is the voice of the all-seeing inspector.

I will take care [s]he shall not think of making any [transgressions]. I will single out one of the most untoward of the prisoners. I will keep an unintermitted watch on [her]. I will watch until I observe a transgression. I will minute it down. I will wait for another: I will note that down too. I will lie by for a whole day: [s]she shall do as [s]he pleases that day, so long as [s]he does not venture at something too serious to be endured. The next day I produce the list to [her]. – You thought yourself undiscovered: you abused my indulgence: you see how you were mistaken. Another time, you may have rope for two days, ten days: the longer it is, the heavier it will fall upon you. Learn from this, all of you, that in this house transgression never can be safe.213

The woman, too, is kept under close inspection in much the same manner. By means of the same strategy as the watchman in the Panopticon, the woman receives reports on her status every day: fashion magazines telling her how to dress and what to feel, enjoy and buy; the e-mails alerting her to all the easy ways of losing weight and becoming popular; the repeated image of the rail-thin model or celebrity in television, movies, videos receiving all the attention, getting everything she wants, beaming in all the grandeur of her beautiful bodily adornment.

While Deleuze notes that “[a] schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analysts couch… a breath of fresh air, a relationship with the

213 Bentham, Jeremy. The Works of Jeremy Bentham. Ed. John Bowring. Edinburgh: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co, 1863, p. 81-82; Bentham’s emphasis.

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world”, Foucault finds that even the outside world, even the intimacy of one’s private chambers, even the distorted scenes of Picasso’s variation, are all overcoded, all commodified, all organized according to the direction and pervasion of desiring gazes.214

Pushing Foucault up against Deleuze, and introducing Klein’s partiality of objects into this regime of optical desire, it is possible to recognize the miniscular stature of the small theatres. The bounds of these localized spaces, imbued and governed by gazes, are not the white outlines of the figures of the boy and the dog in the bottom right corner of the painting, but the different elements of assemblages of partial objects constituting the empty cavities of smooth bodies. A woman does not reflect on the totality of her body as a whole, but on the individual partial aspects of her assemblage. The pair of breasts, the curve of her ass, the flab on her belly, the sag under her chin, and on and on until there is a complete colonization of the body, are all different figures acting on brightly lit stages.215 The woman can place her breasts on the bank of the stage, examine them from every spectator’s position, superimpose them on the computer screen and scrutinize them as virtual images, turn them around and appraise them from every angle. The breasts, the ass, the legs, the arms, etc. are all stars of their own shows, easily manipulable, easily augmented and diminished, regulated or modified at every corner: “partial objects become the possessions of a person and, when required, the property of another person.”216 With all the new cosmetic technologies and prescriptions capable of completely altering if not removing these partial objects, it is possible to understand the

214 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, chap. 1. 215 Morgan, Kathryn Pauly. “Sculpted Bodies: Women and the Knife: Cosmetic Surgery and the Colonization of the Body.” Ed. Welton, Donn. Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. pp. 325-349, p. 325-349. 216 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 71.

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woman as a loose collection of independent theatres displaying this or that body part.

Just as “scenes are lines of light before they become contours and colours,”217 the traces of heterogeneous body parts take part in a grotesque play in which both audience and actor are at the hands of a hidden director before whom they are judged to be too fat, too soft, imperfect, disgusting, or pure signs of complete inadequacy.

The exacting architectural figure has since been left behind. The circular structure of the cell-made walls rimming the periphery of the prison, the central tower in a perfectly bearded position, and the building as a whole has fallen out of favor. This does not mean, however, that the principle of organization and mechanism of power are also absent. In fact, with the closing of the last working panopticons, the advantages and effects of their original implementation have been more successful than ever. The panoptic regime and the style of subjection have been so successful that there is no longer the need for the actual building. “The panoptic schema, without disappearing or losing any of its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body; its vocation was to become a generalized function.”218 The motivation for continual and implicit reinforcing reception of the structure of the social field based on the panoptic principle made the circular architecture otiose. “Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or particular form of behavior must be imposed, the panoptic schema may be useful.”219 Individuals willingly enter and take stock in a lifelong economy of self-monitoring. Even though the looming inspector’s tower is gone, the indistinguishable and ambiguous glow still lingers. Merely look at the dark silhouetted

217 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 80-81. 218 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 207. 219 Ibid., p. 205.

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body stuck halfway between the doors in the back. “So the abstract formula of

Panopticism is no longer ‘to see without being seen’ but to impose a particular conduct on a particular human multiplicity.”220

These notions of the internalization of the desire to be desired and the punitive status of a woman in contemporary society, however, are simply reiterations of social commentaries, popularized by the repetition of slogans. Such comments, while still salient, are only half of the picture. Given the changes in social structures since the seventies – from the ubiquity of media outlets, the constant barrage of advertisements and advice, to the increasing ability to meet these standards through cosmetic surgery – new abstract apparatuses are necessitated to make sense of these developments. Through pervasive systems of reward and punishment, the prison of the body is more mobile than ever. The arrangements, flows, connections, and organization of technological networks provide the possibility for the implementation of continuous normalization and surveillance, but also indicate points of breaking down, ways of turning the machine upside down, opportunities for plugging the machine back into itself and forcing it to cause its own destruction. It is the possibility for accessing the points of breaking off one’s corroboration of the system, of subverting the double nature of control, that must be effectuated; and, through the diagramming of a new methodology, a new geography will be actualized. As we will see, many contemporary performance artists utilize this diagrammatic methodology. “Thus there is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points it connects up, certain relatively free or unbound points, points of

220 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 34; Deleuze’s own emphasis.

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creativity, change, and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to understand the whole picture.”221 To diagram is to diagnose these points of resistance and creativity, to see how modern social practices aim to control its redundant topography, to point out each fissure in the landscape and exploit it. For every pattern of corroboration of the standard system there are multiplicities of lines of flight out of the system.

Desire is invested in all sides of relations, those in positions of “domination” as well as those being “dominated”; they all depend on the force of desire flowing through them. The flow of desire is the production of intensities on different planes and levels; it is not a personal matter, not his or her desire in the case of a subjective Freudian drive

(although desire can be captured, reduced, and represented as such), but a multiplicitous tension between impersonal relations and connections. Out of a nondescript interaction of intensive movements a body is produced, an assemblage is christened, and a body type is heralded. The relations between bodies are not asymmetrical, distinct downward spirals, but sites of combination, stimulation, or opposition used in order to compose the types of bodies, sculpting and trimming at this point and sometimes at others; to classify these compositions so as to make them easily understandable, clearly identifiable, and simply accessible, and to normalize behavior based on the desire to meet and adhere to the shifting classifications evident through a timely composition. The reality of desire is opened up through practice. The purchase of a certain commodity is a crossing of the threshold of the economy of desire and the entrance to a living web of power relations.

Buying one cosmetic surgery opens up the possibility and the desire for every other type

221 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 44.

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of cosmetic surgery. As the desirable body type continually changes, the possibilities for corroborating these changes through consumption of image altering products mirrors the changes. It is the flow of desire through each of these nodes in the social network, mobilized through technological developments, that leads to concrete questions and potentialities. The economy can be exposed and subverted at each point: walking up to the beauty counter, entering the surgeon’s office, buying each product that proclaims to shape one’s body into the heralded image, spending time consuming popular websites and television programs, etc.

The distribution of bodies in this widespread economy of desire cannot be revealed by a couple of studies or through the examination of a particular medium; rather, the situation involves the structural operation of the whole economy – the medical field, assorted forms of media, psychological advice, personal pamphlets (magazines and self- help books tailored for “you”), individual relations, sexual relations, professional relations, etc. Bodily relations – between individuals, the individual and herself, the individual and various images – are intimately corroborated. This acquiescence is seen in the depiction of the direct confrontation in the panoptic system. A woman does not fear some distant homogenized, exterior power located outside of the field, but feels the endless echo of the flow of desire in her own ears. Although there appears to be a figure lurking in the doorway, the success or failure of the schema relies on the corroboration of individual women; as the message to consume and comply is sent out, the purchase and the compliance is sent back, producing a positive feedback loop. The successful completion of this loop perpetuates the social structuration. The shadowy figure is much

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closer than he appears. Opticality is in front and in back, always within and never beyond.

The bright light source illuminating the panoptic figure offers very little information on the identity or purpose of such an individual. He or she is the emblem of a “machinery of a furtive power.”222 Beyond the heavy walls, dungeons and security fortresses of medieval prisons, beyond the analytically oriented space of the panoptic field, the prison is now a mobile menagerie existing in and through each particular body, or, more specifically, each severed body part. As the woman becomes her own director, complicit in the feedback loop, arranging herself, removing the fleshy excess, sculpting what little remains, “[s]he inscribes in [her]self the power relation in which [s]he simultaneously plays both roles; [s]he becomes the principle of [her] own subjection.”223

The woman is her own director because she is shrouded in the social practice of corporeal consumption, buying into the heralded image and supporting it at every point along the way. All activity, every movement, every jiggle or flex of her thigh, every type of food entering or exiting her mouth are recorded and coded, the continuation of punitive social practices. She cannot afford to let one element stray from the confines of the particular theatres.

In the midst of all this oil drama there seems to be something missing, some influential element of the play of gazes let out, present by its very absence. The activity and effects of the painting are clear. Each figure fulfills his or her role perfectly. Yet where is the viewer? Does the viewer not greatly contribute to these motions, to this

222 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 203. 223 Ibid., p. 203.

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scene? Foucault has left us with only half of the picture. The face in the mirror is not mine. We recognize the actual structure of the painting emitted from the lone, caped silhouette emerging or vanishing from or into the brightly lit hallway. The gaze leaves no plane untouched, but how is the viewer’s feeling of the field of desiring gazes included?

On top of highlighting the power that sees but cannot be seen is the opposite perspective: synopticism.

III

The description so far

conjure[s] up a host of scenes which create reflections, flashes and shimmerings, visibilities varying according to the time and the season, which distribute the descriptions in a light-being, a reunion of all the light to which Faulkner [for us Picasso] holds the secret…And above these two elements there exists the third phenomenon, centers of power that are unknown, unseen and unsaid.224

If we follow Foucault’s description and observe the perfect symmetry emitted by the figure of the precious young princess, we are left with only half the picture. According to

Foucault, the fluttering spiral of the scene, however free and flowing, finds its fulcrum, its dispersing center, on the image of the Infanta Margarita, the princess. Once wearing a pink, gray, and florid dress in Velasquez’s original, she is now caught in the geometric gown that Picasso has offered her, giving the impression of perfectly limned proportions.

The lines spreading down from her face, along the sides of her neck, and filling out the bared top of her chest melt into blackness just a moment before the sight of the occupied dress. The two maids of honour are still lurching toward the princess’s every whim, placating her with advice and whispers of glory. The maid to the left is kneeling as if

224 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 81.

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caught in a quick moment of worship of the new member of the monarchial family. The maid to the right also offers her services and then quickly slips into the background almost unnoticeably. These two gazes lend to the location of the cap of the visual cone pressing on the Infanta, the symbolic center of a large X.

Foucault notices:

a large X: the top left-hand point of this X would be the painter’s eyes; the top right-hand one, the male courtier’s eyes [one of the Siamese twins in Picasso’s paintings]; at the bottom left-hand corner there is the corner of the canvas represented with its back towards us (or, more exactly, the foot of the easel); at the bottom right-hand corner, the dwarf (his foot on the dog’s back). Where these two lines intersect, at the centre of the X, are the eyes of the Infanta.225

Pulling and distorting this crossed shape is a second figure,

a vast curve, its two ends determined by the painter on the left and the male courtier on the right – both these extremities occurring high up in the picture and set back from its surface; the centre of the curve, much nearer to us, would coincide with the princess’s face and the look her maid of honour is directing towards her. This curve describes a shallow hollow across the centre of the picture which at once contains and sets off the position of the mirror at the back.226

At this point, however, Foucault stops short, not yet aware of the methods and practices that he later utilizes. This organic curve, the rounded center initially focused on the princess before pulling back to the limits of the room, is mobile. The scene is filled with bodies, objects, and gazes: a rotating landscape of optical coincidence; the scene is never the same; it is ever changing, mutating through the positivity of the feedback loop.

Merely see how the cap of the cone of the vision of the viewer can vacillate from the princess to the mirror, from the mirror to the caped silhouette, from this shadowy figure to the bodies without organs, to the erupting canine cavity, and on and on. The vertex of

225 Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 12-13. 226 Ibid., p. 13.

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the cone, an organic X, is a stereotactic tool directing the delicate tip of the direction of the gaze. This heated beam, the radiation of desire, can transform the scene without any trouble at all, not even a body can hinder the movement of the gaze; in fact, the body is produced by the very action of this mobile ubiquity. The ceaseless striding of gazes traversing the field structures the mode of organization, the construction and placement of bodies along convergent paths. This visual structuration tells the eye what to see and the body what to be. No body is safe; there is no opportunity to escape. The gaze is a meticulous, surgical tool pressing on the belly, perceiving through the flesh, severing the

“self” from the body. The organization of the painting is mobile, and we are only offered a frozen image for a mere moment. This place of relations, or, more accurately, non- relations, which are colored by the flow of forces, is just a single instant in a swirling spiral of mutations. Foucault has offered a single interpretation of the relations that

Velasquez so perfectly captured, but with the recognition of the viewers, of the roles we play, of every instance of corroboration, Picasso’s variations on Vasquez’s original Las

Meninas open up the positive possibilities of continuous, and quite literal, transfiguration.

The scene pivots around the momentary star, the Infanta. From the top of her head there is a lengthy curve flowing from the back wall, arching over the cap of her skull, and sliding directly into our gaze. This is the first “sagittal” line pulling us into the middle of the commotion, this material milieu. The second sagittal line appears from the head of the royal figure in the mirror and stretches out, again, directly into our gaze.

However, these are not the only planes ordering the picture. In fact, there are many

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“ineluctable lines”227 protruding from the far end of the room, striated and ordered the surface of vision, cascading over the surface of the distorted bodies, holding the viewer frozen in his tracks. Our position before the painting, as the viewers, is articulated by these many peculiar functions, positions that are distinct yet fluid, sharp yet mobile, repeated but never identically. Our position, a momentary formulation, “ is a compound of relations between forces.”228 As the viewers we are characterized by a multiplicity of forces that come into contact with the various forces that are opened up with each passing set of relations. These forces or flows of desire contract at the particular location of the viewer or body, producing a localized site for corroboration or destabilization of the social field. We emerge not as a concentrated, enclosed, self-identical entity, but as an ambiguous nexus of conflicting and discontinuous forces pushing and pulling in different directions. There is no singular will filtering the plurality of sensations into a self- identical unity, but a synthetic conception strewn across a multiplicity of incoherent relations. As Nietzsche says, the will (or desire) can be “understood as the theory of the relations of dominance under which the phenomenon ‘life’ arises.”229 For Nietzsche, as for Foucault, “willing [or desiring] seems to be above all something complicated, something that is a unity only as a word.”230 The “self” as a desiring subject is not “the best known thing in the world,” nor is it that which is “truly known to us, known completely, without deduction or additions,” but “only a complex of feeling and

227 Ibid., p. 13. 228 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 124. 229 Nietzsche, Freidrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin books, 1973, paragraph 19. 230 Ibid., paragraph 19.

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thinking.”231 Given this Nietzschean conception of the viewer or viewed as decentered subjects, we find ourselves caught in a diverse mutating web of desire, structured by sagittal lines that “pass not so much through forms as though particular points which on each occasion mark the application of a force, the action or reaction of a force in relation to others, that is to say an affect like ‘a state of power that is always local and unstable’.”232 These lines are yet again representative of the heterogeneous state of relations that continue to change and reconstitute each “point” in the scene. What is considered desirable at one point in time is quickly passed over with mutations in relations. Desire passes through lines of light, unfolding through different formations.

We, the observers, are exterior yet intimately involved, distinct yet defined by the growing ability to affect and be affected by the variable scene lying within and before us, drawn into a pre-coded exchange of bodies and scenes. We are as much a part of the perpetuation of the scene as ever. The scene does not exist without our corroboration in the lines of light striating the field.

The colors, shapes, and figures hovering around the edge of the painting serve as the hinges of a shape about to be doubled. So far, with only a little anachronous pressing and combination of terms from throughout Foucault’s oeuvre, this moving cone of vision has constituted the panoptic figure. The sagittal lines that initially directed our eyes toward the mirror on the back wall now focus and refocus on different figures. Yet, again, this is only half of the diamond, the visibly articulated shape that has remained loose and unchecked. Now, in the diagrammatical Foucauldian spirit, the spirit that once

231 Ibid., paragraph 19. 232 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 73.

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proclaimed, “I am a cartographer”, it is possible to map the rest of the scene.233 Grasping this unbridled, flexible shape of the desiring gaze, the scene can now be inverted. The diamond can be repeated so that it not only presses back into the paintings but also stretches out to the distant position of the observers. Just as the stereotactic tip of the cone moved from figure to figure, from body to body, from body part to body part in the painting, the same can be done to us, the observing audience. The organic panopticism organizing the painting also organizes the life exterior to the classical Spanish scene. The tip of the reversed diamond falls on us; it falls on every particular viewer. This completion of the diamond structuration ushers in the use of the synopticon.

The endless series of synoptic viewers account for the totality of anonymous individuals walking up to, standing before, and walking away from the paintings hanging on the walls. The viewer is not a particular individual branded as an admirer of Picasso’s studies, but the momentary formation of an identity gained through consumption and participation. There is a positing of an identity of slippage: present identities slipping into future identities, the woman reacting to her accident of bodily identity, the figures in the painting and the witnesses to the scene, the set of relations opening up into new relations, the flowing of forces that are cut off and opened up with each new differential relation. Upon entrance into the field of gazes, the body is captured, identified, and coded by the arrangement of the social network. Yet, as the network is in continual mutation, expanding and contracting along with the adaptation of the individual gazes, the body mutates according to the functioning of the scene. Each view morphs into the

233 Interview with Foucault from Nouvelles Litteraires, 17 March 1975; from Ibid., p. 44.

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next, anyone is able to stand before the painting and become the viewer, just as anyone is able and encouraged to become a constituting element of the mobile social network.

Etymologically, synopticism refers to the many (‘syn’ indicates ‘together’) seeing the few (‘optics’ suggests sight or vision), and at first it seems that the synopticon is merely the opposite of the panopticon: rather than allowing the few to see the many, it enables the many to see the few. But since Deleuze has done away with the confines of the heavy penal architecture, as Foucault seemed to have wanted, and left us with an arrow-headed schema, pan-synopticism now allows “a particular multiplicity” to “impose a particular conduct” on the few.234 With the upsurge in media, with the possibility of tying millions and millions of viewers to a single image, a particular body type, the many can now impose imperatives on a small number of celebrated individuals. More and more the light of the synoptic gaze is cast from various positions toward a single image that might lie far beyond the walls of the home. Watchers of a movie, of a television show, of a popular website, and every other form of mass media, are drawn together to bolster the cone of desire. Each particular observer plays into the synoptic schema; each visual consumer supports the flow of desire; each gaze cast upon the randomly selected few structures the optical cone; each position in the field of the diamond animates this artificial body. The observers act upon the observed, and the observed act upon the observers: a double corroboration. The positions are innominate yet forceful, possible of both affecting and being affected. With the introduction of the synoptic side of the diamond, and its attachment to the rotating hinges of the panoptic side of the diamond,

234 Ibid., p. 34.

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we offer Foucault the pure disciplinary function of “a figure of a political technology that may and must be detached from every specific use.”235 Since the panopticon and the synopticon are two sides of the same mechanism of desire, they can easily be inverted without losing the desiring force flowing through heterogeneous relations. Recognizing the optical cone evident in the painting offers one perspective; highlighting the opposite cone offers many others. In this way, the flow is maintained, the movement continues through newly diagrammed relations.

This is not to say that the localized yet diffused flow of desire radiates from a particular position in the striated social field, such as the celebrated individual with the idealized body or the many’s potency for consumption, for these desiring-desired- desiring relations move along and through the plurality of lines connecting the viewers and the viewed, indicating points of conflict, revealing changes in relations. This means that desire is not situated at the site of the image of the feminine ideal, nor is it identified with the mass of viewers. No modality is sovereign, no position is privileged; the flow of desire is persistent and intelligible, engendered by the very existence of forces flowing through relations. Desire comes as much from the periphery, the most distant observer, as from the objectified image; complicity persists at each of the countless points in the diamondic schema. Each position differs yet depends on every other. The heralded body type is only such because of the functioning of the flow of desire emitted by gazes cast upon it, alighting the space and the constituting tension in which a body can be displayed so openly and transmitted so quickly. Viewers are brought into intimate relations with

235 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 205.

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the center, where the center is each particular body in a given milieu, and the desirable image is placed immanently in the space of the viewer. Desire is the effect of the confrontation of the social body with itself, the intensive looping feedback of forces perpetuated at every moment of participation, forming an organic diamond loosely structured by the new forms of media, which are able to transmit information, images, imperatives, advice, etc. more quickly with the rapid advances in technology. The lines of force are drawn into a tighter and tighter ball, the world is reduced down to minimal yet complex arrangements, imbuing the world with a gravitational force experienced in multifarious “points, knots, or focuses…spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in a definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain types of behavior.”236 What the introduction of this pan-synoptic schema offers is a possible answer to Foucault’s questions:

In a specific type of discourse on [embodiment], in specific places…what were the most immediate, the most local power relations at work? How did they make possible these kinds of discourses, and conversely, how were these discourses used to support power relations? How was the action of these power relations modified by their very exercise, entailing a strengthening of some term and a weakening of others, with effects of resistance and counterinvestments, so that there has never existed one type of stable subjection, given once and for all?237

Without merely changing terms around, it seems that this methodological manner of investigation of relations constitutive of the social field can lead us toward a discovery of what occurs in today’s society with issues of embodiment, the “tyranny of slenderness,”238 the proliferation of eating disorders, the problems arising with an ever changing body image, the consumerization of the self, and other questions surrounding

236 Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 An Introduction, p. 96. 237 Ibid., p. 99. 238 Chernin, Kim. The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness. New York: Harper & Row, 1981.

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these issues. What institutional formations allow for the exercise of the flow of desire?

In what ways do television, the Internet, film, psychology, the medical field, the new technologies and advancements in the flow of information lend to this play of relations through the pan-synoptic field? These problems must be addressed on each plane: including the poly-directional sagittal lines that arch over individual bodies, the gazes emitted from the panoptic and synoptic positions, each location within this field of gazes, the sinister and dexterous sides of the body, the body parts held up for display and scrutiny, and every anatomical plane dividing the body into smaller and smaller theatres.

This new model of desire, a possible diamondic diagram of an efficacious and pervasive strategy of modern times, is a means for making sense of the flow of desire churning through changing, pervasive mediums. The pan-synoptic diamond is a visually imaginable impetus that forces us to become aware of our intimate involvement in what is occurring, our complicity in the continuation of an operative social network. The sad state of the fashion industry, the ill effects it has on women’s body image, the maleficent environment that has caused anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, addiction to cosmetic surgery, binge and compulsive eating, feelings of inadequacy, the commodification of selves, all continue, all thrive in today’s society because they are supported at each point in the diamond shaped social field. A relation only exists as long as there are differences that constitute them, forces only flow when there are relations to flow through, and we are always and already intimately involved and implicated in a diamond structuration of contemporary society that not only allows such issues to spread across part of the globe but actually encourages and rewards these behaviors.

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It is not enough, however, to merely record and become aware of one’s complicity in the predominant apparatuses of capture and social normalization; rather, it is necessary to recognize the possibility for destabilization. At each nexus, along with the possibility for the perpetuation of punitive social relations, there is also the potential for subversion of the system. The pan-synoptic schema is a diagrammatic methodology for mapping strategies of power: it “produces an historical image of how strategies of power attempt to replicate themselves in forms of surveillance, documentation, and expression on one hand, and in the spatial organization of collective life on the other.”239 This diagram provides the tools for the conceptualization of social arrangements and connections, and for abstracting out the structure of the economy of desire in order to locate the potentiality for destabilization of the system. Since the structuration of contemporary society has left behind the enclosed apparatuses of penal institutions, leaving only tenuous strategies and practices, there is the need for a way to harness and disrupt the mobility of the modern modulation of control. The stonewalls and dark and narrow cells of the penal institution are gone, but the immensity of control is greater than ever. The addition of the synoptic element offers exactly that: a way to become aware of the complicit nature of everyday activity, of one’s corroboration in an undulating hierarchy of stratified bodies.

This new diagram indicates the points of corroboration, but only so as to decode them and reveal that these nodes are simultaneously fraying fissures spreading open for the introduction of points of catastrophic movements that will bring about the demise of

239 Rodowick, D.N. “Reading the Figural”, Camera Obscura. 24: pp.11-46 p. 17.

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the predominant field of desire. Foucault has brought us half the way, and the previous generation of theorists has certainly utilized Foucault’s contributions to the fullest possible extent; yet, as we have seen, this is only half the picture. Now, with the installation of the other half of the diamond, the social style of structuration provides the necessary tools for the mutation of the social apparatuses and technologies, making room for the potentiality for becoming-other. This process of destabilization or deterritorialization, then, provides the necessary tools for effectuating Deleuze’s program for change. With the pan-synoptic diagram in hand, one can:

The diagram provides the methodology for location, experimentation, effectuation, and creation. There is now the opportunity to turn away from the surface of the gallery of desire, for inserting oneself at discontinuous points along its face and crossing over forbidden thresholds into the chaotic outside. There is a resounding “No” to the desire to consume the same products, the obliteration of the repeated image, experimentation with modes of becoming that break inveterate patterns of behavior that control the dynamics of collective societal relations, and an even louder affirmation of the potential for alternative practices and utilization of a given space. “In a pre-established geography, which extends…from bedrooms so small that ‘one can’t do anything to them’ to the legendary, long-lost attic that ‘could be used for everything,’ everyday stories tell

240 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 161.

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us what one can do in it and make out of it.”241 From the very spaces that serve as means for survival and means for surveillance, one can diagram new uses and novel potentialities. The most obvious examples of such diagrammatics is seen in the work of artists who actually harness the power of social structuration in order to turn the tables and aesthetitize their lives with the very tools of control and normalization that they have been offered.

Contemporary postmodern artists, such as Hasan Elahi242 and Orlan243, have taken hold of the very tools practices and apparatuses that have been installed to survey, control, and normalize society into a homogenous mass of disciplined bodies in order to make their lives works of art, a performance art of everyday life; they are modern day aestheticians. After being arrested and detained by the I.N.S on a return trip from abroad,

Hasan Elahi, a thirty-five year old Rutgers professor, realized it was no longer possible to escape the stream of surveillance. Despite demonstrating that there was no possible way that he was the individual on the terrorist watch list that the government has assumed him to be, they still tracked him everywhere he went. Eventually, after conceding that he was captured by the striated visual terrain, that the field of vision had become utterly pervasive, Elahi found the only available line of escape: he self-surveyed and self- documented his entire life. At the beginning, before he went anywhere, he would call an

F.B.I. agent to let them know exactly where he was going, what he was doing, and every other possible detail that might factor into the outing. This information included the

241 Certeau, Michel de The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, p. 121. 242 See http://www.trackingtransience.com/ to find out where Elahi is at right now. 243 See http://www.orlan.net/ for further description of her work.

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exact proportions of materials he would consume, the number of the bathroom stall that he used, the way he combed his hair, and every possible detail that he could imagine.

Documenting nearly every hour of his life, Elahi’s website now holds over 20,000 pictures spanning the last three years of his life. Elahi even carries a G.P.S device that transmits signals to an online map that pinpoints his exact location at all times. The aim of Elahi’s endeavor is to encourage others to do the same so that the information data pool will short-circuit from the flood of information and documentation flowing into government bureaucracies; for, as Deleuze himself says, “a society is only afraid of one thing: the deluge…Something which would flow and which would carry away this society to a kind of deterritorialization which would make the earth upon which it has set itself up dissolve: this, then, is the crisis.”244

Parisian artist Orlan also embraces the panspectrality of contemporary society in different ways. Orlan has seen the way that cosmetic surgery has continued to skyrocket in popularity, and this fact about consumer practice has led Orlan to push this modern trend to extremes. By opening her body up to experimentation in a series of surgeries,

Orlan has given herself up to what she has called Carnal Art, the extreme modification of the body, but mostly her face, through popular means of beautification. Orlan literally consumes the flow of desire, and it is possible to see the bumps and bulges protruding out of her body; rather than trying to fight and arrest the contemporary desire to buy the perfect corporeal adornment, she has investigated these conventions by inscribed her body with consumer practices. When the trend in plastic surgery was cheek implants,

244 Deleuze, Gilles. “Anti-Oedipe et Mille Plateaux (Cours Vincennes) 16/11/1971,” www.webdeleuze.com

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Orlan implanted silicon lumps into her temples; when the operating room has become a booming business in the beauty- producing machine, Orlan transforms the hospital into a carnal theatre, a living baroque parody of scalpels and organs. By disentangling herself from the striae of the capitalist field of desire, she reinserts herself on the plane, and considered her body the ultimate ready-made, a field of the innocent possibilities to produce the perfect monstrosity. Orlan has become a “paradox of festivals,”245 a fabrication of deformation, both actress and director, a surgical exhibition, the target of a heated beam of desire; in short, a modern day aesthetician illuminated by a cone of self- imposed desire in a compound gallery of desire. From a position of transgressive marginality, Elahi and Orlan began lives of total and almost unlivable immersion in the flow of desire.

Through a diagrammatic understanding of social practices of normalization and the effective structuration of these practices, these artists and many others246 have harnessed the flow of desire so that they could begin to destabilize the system and reorient the social field. Such diagrammatic analyses consider the pre-established landscape a number of different ways. At each moment in a geographical schema there is the possibility for the perpetuation of surveillance and control; but, simultaneously, there is the potentiality for drawing a burning vector, a line of escape out of the system, or sometimes the opportunity for transversing the face of the system, thereby re- conceptualizing the very practices of social organization: a viral destratification of the technologies of the capture of the flow of desire. The system can and is being

245 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 2. 246 Joy Garnett, Cindy Sherman, and Stelarc are some other contemporary artists programming the diamondic schema.

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compromised, and pan-synoptic diagrammatics is the means for the insertion of such panoramic paranoia.

Conclusion: Tracing Over the Thesis Defense

The four chapters of this work corresponded to the four moments of diagrammatics. This reworking and reconstruction of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of diagrammatics has certainly undergone many changes; it has collected together, in a single, mobile diagram, many of the concepts that populate the works of Foucault,

It was then my hope to retain the excitement and fervor that has led me to spend so much time with this constellation of ideas and concepts through my own exposition. While

Foucault has certainly provided a wide array of important tools for this study, I believe that he ultimately stops too soon, always working within a social domain. Deleuze and

Through a radical exposition of some Foucauldian and Deleuzian concepts, diagrammatics, as I have conceived of it, attempts to dynamically transform the traditional image of thought. This new manner of doing philosophy, which is more of a

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stylistics and aesthetics in a very Nietzschean sense, reconciles the speed of thought with the movement of becomings, thereby creating

a new relationship among philosophy, art, literature, the social, and the world of the outside. Given this momentous evaluation of philosophy, diagrammatics should be read as more of a melody populated by refrains, choruses, crescendos, and decrescendos. So as you finish reading through this attempt at constructing an intensive style of philosophy, try to actualize and harness the power of a challenge to the traditional image of philosophy, a violent push that leads to a heightened state of life.

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